completion autolist has time-sensitive interface

[frederik@xxxxxxx]

Dear Zsh Hackers,

Sometimes completion is so laggy on my system that when I press TAB
after e.g. "man perl", nothing seems to happen. So I press it again.
Still nothing happens. Completion seems broken.

Took me a while to figure out the problem. It's related to "setopt
autolist" (which is on by default for me?).

What happens is that if I just press TAB once, e.g. after "man perl",
there is a one-second delay and a prompt "zsh: do you wish to see all
201 possibilities (51 lines)?". At this point I can press TAB again,
which is equivalent to "y" I guess, and I see a list of completions.

However, if I press TAB twice quickly in succession then I see no
list, it is exactly as if there are no completions at all. (Actually
if the prompt is at the bottom of the screen, I get a newline) I find
it confusing that the completion interface would be time-sensitive in
this manner. Why TAB-delay-TAB would behave differently from TAB-TAB.
Usually everything I do on the terminal has the property that it
doesn't matter how fast or slow I type, it's only the order of the
keys that's important...

Someone on #zsh (user "jp" - thanks) recommended "bashautolist" but it
has the same problem, only after three TABs.

Thanks,

Frederick