[mgedmin]

I tried, for a week, got very frustrated and switched back.

The little itch that drove me crazy was command-line editing: in bash (and all readline apps) when I have

   command long/path/to/some/file

I can press Alt-Backspace to delete 'file', or I can press Ctrl-W to delete 'long/path/to/some/file'.

I tried various hacks to make zsh do the same, then gave up.

[shabble]

    bindkey '^[^?' backward-kill-word 

might do the trick? (possibly '^[^h' depending on what your backspace key sends. Ctrl-v <backspace> should give you something you can copy)

[mgedmin]

This makes Alt-Backspace do the same thing as Ctrl-W, which is delete-everything-until-the-next-space. I'm missing the delete-last-segment-of-the-path function.

Edit: I know I can customize the word style using $WORDCHARS, or 'autoload select-word-style'; my problem is that I'm used to having the capability to use two different word styles at once.

I'm looking through the command list in zshzle(1), and I'm a bit confused about the differences between backward-delete-word and backward-kill-word. Some short experiments I did failed to notice any differences (foo/bar/baz M-x backward-delete-word deletes foo/bar/baz). There's also vi-backward-kill-word which deletes 'baz', then '/', then 'bar', then '/', then 'foo'. I want a key to delete 'baz', then 'bar/', then 'foo', and I've no idea how to get it...

[shabble]

Hrmm. It works as you want for me, but there may be some other config item I've set.

The other alternative is to try:

    autoload -U select-word-type
    select-word-type bash

which should override C-w to do what you want. I haven't looked at it enough to see if you can get both behaviours simultaneously though (and it requires a fairly recent zsh iirc)