Re: Slow completion

[Peter Stephenson <p.stephenson@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, 06 Mar 2013 22:40:41 +0100
Thorsten Kampe <thorsten@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Zsh completion has always been kind of slow for me (in comparison to 
> bash) but I always contributed this to the superior functionality (my 
> .zshrc is two and a half times as long as my .bashrc).
> 
> Today I decided that it had become unbearable and started investigating. 
> 
> I tested a simple completion like
> 
>     /us<TAB>r/bi<TAB>n/cada<TAB>ver.exe
> 
> The directory completion (usr and bin) was already slow but the 
> executable (cadaver.exe) took ages.
> 
> 1. Testing revealed that "setopt path_dirs" was responsible for the slow 
> directory completion.
> 
> The zshoptions manual page says that path_dirs should not apply in the 
> above case[1] but a Process Monitor log showed that Zsh was actually 
> searching through the whole executable path.

It's doing completion equivalent to:

/usr*/bin*/cada*

when you hit TAB in the last case.  This is a feature, but definitely
annoying in the case where path completion is slow.  You can turn it off
for the case where the directories exist by setting the style
accept-exact-dirs to true: I've been doing this under Cygwin.  In other
words, this should complete /usr/bin/cadaver.exe faster the way you're
doing it, since it's one component at a time, but still allows you to
complete /u/b/c in one go.

I don't think we have an option to turn completion of all path segments
off altogether at the moment.

pws