Re: [PATCH] completion: zsh: support completion after "git -C <path>"

Hi Ben

(Resending, my earlier reply was rejected by the list for being HTML.)

On Wed, Jul 15, 2026, at 00:34, D. Ben Knoble wrote:

Any progress here? I just found my local copy of this patch and was
briefly surprised to see it hadn't graduated anywhere (until I
realized conversation had stalled at this point).

Sorry for the very late reply, I was on holiday and then other life
things got in the way of answering :(  I do have a v2 ready, which I
have just pushed to my fork, and which follows this message.

Junio C Hamano [off-list ref] writes:

Doesn't it want to do something similar to what __git_main in
git-completion.bash does at the beginning, namely, this part?

It does, thanks.  v2 no longer skips only leading -C options, but walks
the words in front of the command and skips over the global options and,
where they take one, their arguments, like __git_main does.

That also makes "git -p checkout <TAB>" and "git --git-dir=<path>
checkout <TAB>" complete the arguments of the command, which they did
not before.

Two related gaps are left alone, as they are bugs in the _arguments
specification rather than in the command lookup: -c is not listed there
at all, and --git-dir and friends are spelled "--git-dir=-", which
accepts only "--git-dir=<path>", not the "--git-dir <path>" form.  I can
send patches for those separately.

"D. Ben Knoble" [off-list ref] writes:

But we mark these local, so how do they propagate to the other
functions?

zsh scoping is dynamic, not lexical, so a variable declared "local" in
__git_zsh_main is visible in the functions that are called from it, the
bash helpers included.  That is how __git_dir and __git_cmd_idx are
handed down already, and __git_C_args works the same way.

We should probably note in the log message that the _directories
completion will not account for previous -C

I added a note about this in the log message.

I think we could do _slightly_ better by using a state "->dir" or
something, accumulating the current prefix, and passing that to
_directories as a prefix with -W

I tried that and it works, but it changes what -C offers, which is more
than fixing the completion after -C, so I left it out; happy to send it
on top.  Two things to watch out for there: the accumulated path has to
be made absolute, as -W with ".." gave me the directories of "/", and
the accumulation has to stop before the word that is being completed.

By the way, I've realized that "git -<tab>" has the same problem (a
giant list of files after the other option completions)

That one is older than this patch: the file listing comes from the
fallback at the end of _git,

	let _ret && _default && _ret=0

which is where the "use-compctl" and "globbed-files" tags in your
_complete_help dump come from.  I could not reproduce the repeated
description block with "zsh -f" and only the _complete completer, so
something in my setup or yours may differ there.  Either way it wants
its own topic.

I hope that the change now looks good, and if there is anything I should
still look at just tell me.

Thank you very much
Lutz