Re: [PATCH 3/5] completion: fix Zsh handling of stash names

From: Ben Knoble <ben.knoble@gmail.com>
Date: Oct 19, 2026, 19:56 UTC
Message-ID: <841E7396-646B-4667-84C8-A51BDD7371F2@gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <atHZvexnI0Ia7Xjr@pks.im>

Show 19 quoted lines

> Le 16 oct. 2026 à 04:01, Patrick Steinhardt <ps@pks.im> a écrit :
> 
> On Mon, Oct 12, 2026 at 01:48:29PM -0400, D. Ben Knoble wrote:
>> When Git completes stashes for Zsh, it eventually invokes something like
>> this (via our redefinition of __gitcomp_nl):
>> 
>>    compadd -Q -S " " -p "" -- 'stash@{0}' 'stash@{1}' && _ret=0
>> 
>> Because of -Q, the braces are unquoted, and Zsh will leave us at (for
>> example)
>> 
>>    git stash show stash@{
>>                   cursor ^
>> 
>> From here, the list-choices widget (on Ctrl-D by default) will show
>> stash@{0} and stash@{1}, but the complete-word widget (Tab) will just
>> add another brace. Zsh things we're trying to do a brace expansion, I
> 
> s/things/thinks/

Will fix!

Show 22 quoted lines

>> think! Interestingly, using menu-complete (Ctrl-N) does cycle through
>> matches, since it's taking a slightly different completion path in Zsh.
>> 
>> We might try to fix this by passing surrounding single quotes (using the
>> -S/-p arguments of compadd, which we can do via __gitcomp_nl's other
>> parameters), and indeed Zsh will generate
>> 
>>    git stash show 'stash@{
>>                    cursor ^
>> 
>> but completing here won't find anything, and I'm not totally sure why.
>> 
>> Instead, though, we can let Zsh quote metacharacters (removing -Q) and
>> everything "just works." It changes the output format a bit (users see
>> stash@\{0\}, for example), but I find this an improvement over not being
>> able to complete names at all. menu-complete is unchanged aside from the
>> extra backslashes.
>> 
>> So, override stash listing completion in Zsh with a working version.
> 
> Hm. I assume you tried finding a variant that works for both Bash and
> Zsh so that we don't have to carry this override?

Actually, no. I assumed Bash was working and haven’t tested it either way. Presumably we’d have a report from someone if it were doing what Zsh does?

Many Zsh users, OTOH, use the Zsh-distributed completions, which stackoverflow for me (and anyway I prefer ours).

I won’t have time to see if Bash is also Brien here, but this shouldn’t change Bash’s behavior at least.

Oh, re-reading: yes, I looked for something that was compatible with existing code. I mentioned one such attempt (single quotes). No luck, though.