How can I get zsh's completion working in the middle of the filename?

Question

This works

Normally, zsh's tab completion works well.

$ touch foo-1-bar foo-2-bar
$ touch f<Tab>
$ touch foo--bar
            ^ cursor here

Pressing Tab again brings up a menu from which I can select files.

$ touch foo--bar
foo-1-bar  foo-2-bar

This doesn't

However, this doesn't seem to work with strings where the beginning and end match. For example:

touch foo-bar foo-foo-bar
touch f<Tab>
touch foo-bar
         ^ cursor here. <tab> again.
touch foo-bar
              ^ cursor here.

No menu is brought up, and there is no opportunity to select foo-foo-bar. Is this expected behaviour or a bug? Is there a setting to make a menu appear in the latter scenario?

I'm using oh-my-zsh. I attempted removing all the completion-related lines from ~/.zshrc, but this made no difference.

Answer 1

As per the comments, I tried disabling oh-my-zsh, which fixed this problem. I then went through the oh-my-zsh source, selectively disabling modules.

I previously had CASE_SENSITIVE="true", but commenting out this line fixed it for me. Apparently it's a known bug.

To fix it, I could put the following line in ~/.zshrc after sourcing oh-my-zsh.

zstyle ':completion:*' matcher-list 'r:|=*' 'l:|=* r:|=*'

Answer 2

Personally, I prefer this solution much more - http://zsh.sourceforge.net/FAQ/zshfaq04.html#l50, It works like completion in tcsh, and completes words, that are before cursor only.

Just use

    bindkey '\CI' expand-or-complete-prefix

instead of

    bindkey '\CI' expand-or-complete

(Which is by default).

Answer 3

Another option is setting COMPLETE_IN_WORD as described on the same page - http://zsh.sourceforge.net/FAQ/zshfaq04.html#l50.

setopt complete_in_word

This will try to fill in the word at the point of the cursor, and all the characters after the point of the cursor will be replaced with what is filled.