I use zsh's menu-based tab completion. I press Tab once, and a list of possible completions appears. If I press Tab again, I can navigate this list with the arrow keys. However, is it possible to navigate them with the vi-like H, J, K, L keys instead?
I use emacs mode for command-line input, with bindkey -e in ~/.zshrc. I also use zim with zsh. If relevant, the commands that specify the tab-completion system are here.
Yes, you can by enabling menu select:
zstyle ':completion:*' menu select
zmodload zsh/complist
...
# use the vi navigation keys in menu completion
bindkey -M menuselect 'h' vi-backward-char
bindkey -M menuselect 'k' vi-up-line-or-history
bindkey -M menuselect 'l' vi-forward-char
bindkey -M menuselect 'j' vi-down-line-or-history
bindkey commands in the terminal, but it fails if I put them at the end of ~/.zshrc, with /home/sparhawk/.zshrc:bindkey:186: no such keymap `menuselect'.
zstyle line? Yes, I had that in ~/.zshrc too.
autoload -Uz compinit and compinit didn't work, but I'm not sure if enabling it is the problem, because (a) menu select works fine in a general sense, and always has, and (b) I can manually run the bindkey lines later, which works. Also, I just realised (b) only works if I press tab first, presumably to initialise the completion system, then run bindkey…. Otherwise it fails as above (bindkey: no such keymap `menuselect').
The closest I've come to this is using CTRL-N and CTRL-P to move forward and backward through the list of possible completions, instead of Tab and Shift-Tab. This is more vi-like navigation.
In a config .zsh file I achieve this with:
bindkey '^n' expand-or-complete
bindkey '^p' reverse-menu-complete
And relatedly:
bindkey '^k' up-history
bindkey '^j' down-history
bindkey '^h' backward-delete-char
bindkey '^w' backward-kill-word
bindkey '^r' history-incremental-search-backward
Here are the docs for the bindings.
-M menuselect can be added to bindkey command to restrict the mode here.