Re: completion autolist has time-sensitive interface

[Peter Stephenson <p.stephenson@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, 14 Aug 2018 22:49:58 -0700
<frederik@xxxxxxx> wrote:

> 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.

One possibility would be if you had (presumably inadvertently) a
key with TAB as a prefix.  Then it would delay to see if you're
going to type the full key stroke, and only execute the TAB binding
if you didn't.  It's not very likely, but it's the best I can think
of.

If you run

bindkey | grep '\^I'

you'll probably see something like

"^I" complete-word
"^[^I" self-insert-unmeta

where the second isn't relevant as there's an ESC in front.  If you
see something else starting with ^I that's a problem.

BTW this is probably more suitable for zsh-users where the larger
audience is more likely to have seen something similar.

pws