say, someone has aliased ls to 'ls --color=always' and you want to temporarily override the alias (it does not override functions) Show Sample Output

This only makes sense if you are using command line editing. Create the function in your current zsh session, then type eve PATH go 'UP' in your history and notice the current (editable) definition of PATH shows up as the previous command. Same as doing: PATH="'$PATH'" but takes fewer characters and you don't have to remember the escaping.

short command to find a string in all text files in all subdirectories, excluding all files grep does not deem text files.

Say you want to execute 'file' on the command 'top' (to determine what type of file it is); but you don't know where 'top' resides: preface the argument with = and zsh will implicitly prepend the path.

say you want to edit your PATH variable using bash/zsh commandline editing, this will put something like this in history so you can edit it: PATH=/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin to make this a shell function such that: eev HOME will put /home/dave in the last history event: eev() { print -s "$1='$(eval echo \$$1)'" }

say you've just found all the config files with this command find . -name '*.config' and you need to edit them all vi `!!` will re-execute the command and present them to vi in the argument list don't use if the list is really long as it may overflow the command buffer