Not long after I got zsh-dwim up and running, I went mining in my old Zsh and Bash history files looking for potential transformation candidates. I thought I already implemented them all, but I was doing some spring cleaning and came across some of my notes. It turns out that I was wrong. There were still quite a few ideas in there that I haven’t implemented yet.

One of the more interesting ideas in there was related to the find command. Each time I write anything more complicated than the simplest find command line, I usually follow the same careful workflow:

• Run the command with no -exec option to make sure the correct files are chosen
• Add the -exec option, but echo the commands first
• Remove the echo, and run it one last time

As you can see in the video, that’s precisely what this transformation does. If it isn’t already there, hitting control-u will add the -exec echo {} \; to the command and put the cursor in front of the curly bracket. If the -exec is already followed by an echo, then the echo is removed.

For good measure, one more press of control-u will convert the -exec to a -print0 | xargs -0.

There is a tiny new feature in zsh-dwim

I wanted to be able to automatically place the cursor directly before the curly bracket, but I didn’t have an existing mechanism to do that. The function that places the cursor after a successful transformation now sets the cursor position to the value of the _dwim_cursor variable, if it is defined.