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

[Patrick Steinhardt <ps@pks.im>]

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/

> 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?

> diff --git a/contrib/completion/git-completion.zsh b/contrib/completion/git-completion.zsh
> index d5c526665b..2aea7770d2 100644
> --- a/contrib/completion/git-completion.zsh
> +++ b/contrib/completion/git-completion.zsh
> @@ -135,6 +135,11 @@ __gitcomp_file_direct ()
>  	__gitcomp_file "$1" ""
>  }
>  
> +__git_complete_stashes ()
> +{
> +	compadd -S ' ' -- ${(f)"$(__git stash list | sed -n -e 's/:.*//p')"} && _ret=0
> +}

Patrick