Re: [Feature suggestion] (user configurable) timeout for generating completion lists

[Greg Klanderman <gak@klanderman.net>]

>>>>> On January 23, 2014 Bart Schaefer <schaefer@brasslantern.com> wrote:

> I just knew someone was going to say this.

Ha ha.. I'm sure many were thinking it at least.

> But it's jumping the gun a little to discuss all of this before we even
> know what's really causing the issue.

It will be interesting to see what's really causing the OP's issue.

It does seem that if the OP's issue is slow NFS mounts, it might be
possible to move just the necessary filesystem access calls during
completion to a separate process.

For slow completion due to calling out to a separate process for
completions (_git comes to mind) if that is not currently
interruptible it seems like there might be some hope of adding a
timeout or ensuring C-c will interrupt.

In general I'd much prefer C-c working to interrupt than adding an
arbitrary timeout, as I might want to decide on a case by case basis
how long I'm willing to wait.

The biggest problem I've had with completion being unresponsive was
due to automounts at work (currently have ~53k under a handful of
mount points).  Using the fake-files zstyle mostly works until
completion tries to stat all those automounts to determine the file
type in order to append a '/' or ' '.  So locally I run zsh with a
small patch (to ztat()) that uses a shell variable to configure
automount roots under which all immediate entries are assumed to be
directories without stat'ing.  Works great, though I don't think
several years ago you were willing to incorporate that into zsh.

Greg