When we run compinit, it redefines all the widgets which perform completion.
If I am working on a completion function, I can just use rm -f ~/.zcompdump; compinit to see how my new completion function is working.
However, I think there is a more efficient way to do it.
Suppose I wrote the following completion function from zsh-completions
#compdef cmd
local -a subcmds
subcmds=('c:description for c command' 'd:description for d command')
_describe 'command' subcmds
How can I quickly modify small part of the function and see how the function is working.
There's never any need to rerun compinit. You can use compdef to define your new completion function provided it can be found in $fpath, for example:
compdef -a _cmd cmd
The -a marks _cmd for autoloading.
I tend to work in a temporary directory or local git checkout so define the following alias to quickly add the current directory to the start of $fpath:
alias -- +fpath='fpath=( ~+ $fpath)'
It can also be useful to reload autoloadable functions when you've modified them. For this I have the following function which also removes functions that were defined in the function:
freload() {
local func
for func; do
unfunction ${(k)functions_source[(R)${functions_source[$func]:-X(#s)}]:-$func};
autoload -U $func;
done
}
Another thing I do is I have compdef _foo foo already defined in my .zshrc which makes it very quick and easy to test things out just by defining an _foo function directly on the command-line.