ZSH auto completion for git takes significant amount of time, can I turn it off or optimize it?

Question

Git's tab autocompletion is useful for small projects, but I'm currently working on two big projects that use git and for these it's worse than useless. Whenever I type, say, git add forms<tab>, git takes 20 seconds or more to find the file (in this example, forms.py), and in this timespan I can't do anything else in the terminal. Is there any way to turn off the autocompletion feature, or somehow make it faster?

Answer 1

It's not git auto completing the file names, it's your shell. Do you have the same delay when doing e.g. "cat forms< tab >"?

Check out this post with similar problems:

http://talkings.org/post/5236392664/zsh-and-slow-git-completion

This post suggests adding the following to your .zshrc:

__git_files () { 
    _wanted files expl 'local files' _files     
}

EDIT: Here's the original text of that post

I found many posts relating complaints about how painfully slow git auto-completion can be in large repositories. There were various suggested patches and suggestions to load the latest zsh. Maybe one of those things would work, but all I really want is for it to complete the names of branches and files as they are in the file system. I did not find any suggestions on how to get this behavior so I figured it out for myself. I thought I would share this for anyone who might benefit from it. I just added the following to my .zshrc file:

__git_files () { 
    _wanted files expl 'local files' _files  }

Now I can run git commands and get near instant completion while still getting file completion similar to what ls would provide.