zsh expand-or-complete for all files regardless of command/context

Question

zsh has a feature where command line tab-completion performs context-aware completions, so you can do things like:

# Good:

$ wget g<tab>    # becomes:
$ wget gopher://

$ wget --hea<tab>    # becomes:
$ wget --header=

I like that feature, but sometimes it prevents me from completing filenames in contexts where zsh thinks something else is more appropriate:

# Bad:

$ file vs-debug.apk
vs-debug.apk: Zip archive data, at least v2.0 to extract
$ adb push v<tab>     # becomes:
$ adb push version

I have ^I bound to expand-or-complete (the default widget). What I would like is to have a different key perform unfiltered filename expansion, eg:

# Desired behaviour:

$ adb push v<shift-tab>     # would become:
$ adb push vs-debug.apk

Nothing I saw in zshzle(1) looked appropriate, but I tried the following other widgets anyway:

• expand-or-complete-prefix
• menu-expand-or-complete
• expand-cmd-path
• expand-word

I don't want to lose the context-aware completion. Any ideas for how I can perform unfiltered filename expansion/completion using an alternate key binding?

I am using zsh 5.0.2 (x86_64-apple-darwin12.4.0) and zsh 4.3.17 (i686-pc-linux-gnu).

Answer 1

There's no built-in widget for that, but it's easy enough to define one. I assume you're using the “new-style” completion system (loaded by compinit).

_complete_files () {
  eval "$_comp_setup"
  _main_complete _files
}
compdef -k _complete_files complete-word '^X/'

The completion function follows the ones defined in the zsh distribution in Completion/Base. The compdef builtin declares the function as a completion widgets and binds it to a key.

Answer 2

I guess the better way is to make zsh perform correct completions. Take a look at zsh-completions. It is a collection of completions for all kinds of programms. There are also completions for adb.