WHAT IS GIT BASH COMPLETION CODE

Git’s testing framework is one of the most powerful and simple there is, so it was a pleasure to write those tests. I saw a lot of areas of improvement, but in order to make sure nothing got broken in the process of simplification, I thought it would make sense to have some tests ( 5c293a6).

WHAT IS GIT BASH COMPLETION CODE

Moreover, Git’s bash completion was constantly changing, and it was only a matter of time before one change broke zsh’s completion, so I decided to get involved, understand the code and simplify it to minimize the possibility (e.g. After my patches were applied by zsh developers, Git’s official completion worked much closer to how it did in bash, but there were still minor issues. So I decided to fix zsh’s bash completion emulation once and for all. The completion worked for the most part, but with workarounds, and not exactly as good as bash’s. Fixing the bridgeĮach time I found a bug, I tried to fix it in Git ( patch), and made sure that zsh folks fixed in their side too ( commit), so eventually no workarounds would be needed, and everything would work correctly. Unfortunately, zsh’s bash emulation, and zsh’ bash completion emulation (two different things), are not perfect, so some workarounds were needed in Git’s bash completion script, and those workarounds were not working properly by the time I started to use such completion, so that’s when my involvement begin. You loose some of the features of zsh completion, but it works very efficiently (‘git show v’ was instantaneous). I thought any sane person would see the problem with that, but apparently I was wrong (or was I?).įortunately zsh has bash completion emulation, so it’s possible to use Git’s official bash completion in zsh. I argued that completion is meant to make typing commands more efficient, and if completing a command takes longer than what it would have taken me to type it manually, the completion is failing its purpose. I won’t go to every detail of the discussion, but long story short they were not going to fix the issue because of their uncompromising principles correctness over functionality, even if very few people use that correctness, and the functionality is almost completely broken to the point the completion is not usable in certain cases.

I decided to bring that issue up to the zsh developers, and it caused a lot of fuzz. Specifically, I found that typing ‘git show v’ took several seconds to complete. I work on the Linux (kernel) source tree from time to time, and I noticed that sometimes completion took a long, looong time. In this blog post I will try to guide you through the ordeal from how I identified a problem, and how I ended up fixing it years after, for everyone’s benefit. I use zsh, which I believe is way superior to bash, unfortunately I found many issues with its Git completion. I’ve used Git since pretty much day one, and I use it all the time, so it’s important to me that it’s easy to type Git commands quickly and efficiently.

What is git bash completion