widgets can only be called when ZLE is active

Question

I have been dealing with this problem for almost a month now, and I feel frustrated, Any help would be greatly appreciated.

I am trying to write a widget for my takenote command. The purpose of the widget is to feed all the markdown files in ~/notes folder into fzf so that the user can select one of them and starts editing it. After the user types takenote and presses <tab> I expect the widget to run.

Here is the _takenote.zsh widget definition:

#compdef takenote
local file=$( find -L "$HOME/notes/" -print 2> /dev/null | fzf-tmux +m )
zle reset-prompt
compadd $file
return 1

Unfortunately, the above code doesn't work because of zle reset-prompt, if I remove it then the result would be like this:

And after selecting the file it would turn into:

Which as you see will corrupt the prompt and the command itself. It appears to me that what I need to do is do a zle reset-prompt before calling compadd but this can only work when I bind the function to a key otherwise, I will get the following error:

widgets can only be called when ZLE is active

Answer 1

I finally found a workaround for the issue. Although I am not satisfied with the strategy since it is not self contained in the widget itself, but it works. The solution involves trapping fzf-completion after it is invoked and calling zle reset-prompt.

For registering the trap add the following snippet to your .zshrc file (see Zsh menu completion causes problems after zle reset-prompt ):

TMOUT=1
TRAPALRM() {
   if [[ "$WIDGET" =~ ^(complete-word|fzf-completion)$ ]]; then
      # limit the reset-prompt functionality to the `takenote` script
      if [[ "$LBUFFER" == "takenote "* ]]; then
         zle reset-prompt
      fi
   fi
}

---

The _takenote widget:

#compdef takenote
local file=$( find -L "$HOME/notes/" -print 2> /dev/null | fzf-tmux +m )
compadd $file
return 0

p.s: I would still love to move the trap inside the widget, and avoid registering it in the init script (.zshrc)