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I couldn't figure out a way to search for this and see if it is already explained on the Internet.
I have the following at the command line and I want to hit <TAB> at the end to start file completion:
mycmd process file=data/old/1/
When I was using Bash, that TAB would show me the files in the folder 1/ but with Zsh that doesn't happen unless I enter a space after the = sign. Can I reconfigure Zsh to do that?
setopt magic_equal_subst
This works both with old-style and new-style completion, i.e. with or without compinit.
Completion of file names after = is an obscure and undocumented side effect of the magic_equal_subst option. The documented effect of this option is to enable filename expansion after =.
Most of the time, if you notice the effect of this option at all, it's a desirable effect, e.g.
somecommand --option=~/file
passes a path under your home directory to somecommand, not a path in a directory called ~. However, this also has the usually undesirable effect that an argument == triggers filename expansion:
somecommand foo==bar
passes foo=/bin/bar if the command bar is found in $PATH at /bin/bar. If you want to pass == literally to the command, at least one of the equal signs needs to be quoted, e.g.
somecommand foo=\=bar
somecommand foo\==bar
In the new-style completion system, this is handled inside _default. If you want to get filename completion after = without enabling magic_equal_subst, you need to override or wrap around _default to obtain the same effect. For example:
autoload +X -U _default
functions[_default]="setopt local_options magic_equal_subst; $functions[_default]"
