Make auto completion options remain on screen in zsh, like bash

Question

As Apple rolled out the first developer previews of macOS Catalina, it seems like they have made the default shell into zsh, instead of the good old bash. I've kept myself at Mojave, but nonetheless I've decided to switch to zsh first and get familiar with it.

While all the new features are cool and all, I don't quite like how zsh folds/hides away all the auto completion items after I press control-c or return. In bash, the items remain on the screen, and it's really convenient to refer to in subsequent commands. For example, when I do cd, I quickly press tab twice to give it a ls effect on the fly. Now with zsh, it no longer works.

It's not really a deal-breaker, but I certainly want that behavior back.

Answer 1

There are a lot of ways to customize completion, starting with some boolean options. I think the effect you're after is to turn off always_last_prompt.

setopt no_always_last_prompt

Funny, I've seen the opposite question a lot: people who are used to zsh tend to hate the bash behavior where completing something causes previous terminal commands to scroll away. If you want an ls effect in zsh, you can suspend the current command and run ls.