Disable auto-completion of remote branches in Git Bash?

Question

I'm working on a fairly large git repo with a couple of thousand (remote) branches. I am used to using auto-completion (using [TAB]) in the console (Git Bash in that case), so I unconsciously do that for git commands, too.

e.g. I'd type

git checkout task[TAB]

with the effect that the console stalls for often minutes. Is there a way to limit auto-completion to local branches only?

Answer 1

With Git 2.13 (Q2 2017), you can disable (some of) the branch completion.

git checkout --no-guess ...
# or:
export GIT_COMPLETION_CHECKOUT_NO_GUESS=1

See commit 60e71bb (21 Apr 2017) by Jeff King (peff).
^{(Merged by Junio C Hamano -- gitster -- in commit b439747, 01 May 2017)}

As documented in contrib/completion/git-completion.bash now:

You can set the following environment variables to influence the behavior of the completion routines:

GIT_COMPLETION_CHECKOUT_NO_GUESS

When set to "1", do not include "DWIM" suggestions in git-checkout completion (e.g., completing "foo" when "origin/foo" exists).

Note: DWIM is short for Do What I Mean, where a system attempts to anticipate what users intend to do, correcting trivial errors automatically rather than blindly executing users' explicit but potentially incorrect inputs.

completion: optionally disable checkout DWIM

When we complete branch names for "git checkout", we also complete remote branch names that could trigger the DWIM behavior. Depending on your workflow and project, this can be either convenient or annoying.

For instance, my clone of gitster.git contains 74 local "jk/*" branches, but origin contains another 147.
When I want to checkout a local branch but can't quite remember the name, tab completion shows me 251 entries. And worse, for a topic that has been picked up for pu, the upstream branch name is likely to be similar to mine, leading to a high probability that I pick the wrong one and accidentally create a new branch.

---

Note: "picked up for pu": see a What's cooking in git.git: it starts with:

Commits prefixed with '-' are only in 'pu' (proposed updates) while commits prefixed with '+' are in 'next'.

This is part of the Git Workflow Graduation process.

pu (proposed updates) is an integration branch for things that are not quite ready for inclusion yet

---

This patch adds a way for the user to tell the completion code not to include DWIM suggestions for checkout.
This can already be done by typing:

git checkout --no-guess jk/<TAB>

but that's rather cumbersome.

The downside, of course, is that you no longer get completion support when you do want to invoke the DWIM behavior.
But depending on your workflow, that may not be a big loss (for instance, in git.git I am much more likely to want to detach, so I'd type "git checkout origin/jk/<TAB>" anyway).

Answer 2

I'm assuming that you are using the git-completion.bash script, and that you only care about git checkout.

To accomplish this, I just changed one line in the definition of the _git_checkout () function in git-completion.bash:

<       __gitcomp_nl "$(__git_refs '' $track)"
---
>       __gitcomp_nl "$(__git_heads '' $track)"

My understanding is that this only affects the tab-completion action (because of its location within the * case of the switch-case statement).

Answer 3

If you installed git-completion via homebrew, it's located here: /usr/local/etc/bash_completion.d/git-completion.bash

Following erik.weathers' answer above, I made the following change so autocompletion can work for both local and remote based on the current prefix. By default, it'll only search local, but if I specify origin/… it'll know I want to search remote branches too.

In the _git_checkout () method, change

    __gitcomp_nl "$(__git_refs '' $track)"

to:

    # only search local branches instead of remote branches if origin isn't specified
    if [[ $cur == "origin/"* ]]; then
        __gitcomp_nl "$(__git_refs '' $track)"
    else
        __gitcomp_nl "$(__git_heads '' $track)"
    fi

Of course, you can change origin to something else or you can have it search through through a list of remote prefixes if you have more than 1.

Answer 4

You can hack /etc/bash_completion.d/git

You'll need to edit __git_refs ()

Note that the change in behaviour will apply every where (so even with git push/pull where you might not want it to). You could of course, make a copy of the function or pass an extra parameter, but I leave that to you

Answer 5

You could think that you just the local branches with the alias co and all the branches with the complete command checkout.

You could perform the following. In your .bashrc, you redefine the _git_checkout() function. You let this function unchanged, except the end:

if [ $command -eq "co" ]; then
  __gitcomp "$(__git_refs_local '' $track)"
else
  __gitcomp "$(__git_refs '' $track)"
fi

Then, you just have to define a new function, __git_refs_local, where you remove the remote stuff.

Answer 6

Carey Metcalfe wrote a blog post containing a solution that also edits the auto-completion function, but with slightly newer code than other answers. He also defines an alias checkoutr that keeps the old auto-complete behavior in case it’s ever needed.

In short, first create the checkoutr alias with this command:

git config --global alias.checkoutr checkout

Then find git-completion.bash, copy the _git_checkout function into your shell’s RC file so that it gets redefined, and inside that function, replace this line:

__git_complete_refs $track_opt

with the following lines:

if [ "$command" = "checkoutr" ]; then
    __git_complete_refs $track_opt
else
    __gitcomp_direct "$(__git_heads "" "$cur" " ")"
fi

See the blog post for more details and potential updates to the code.

Answer 7

Modifying $(brew --prefix)/etc/bash_completion.d/git-completion.bash is not a good idea because it will be overwritten every time you update Git through Homebrew.

Combining all the answers I overwrite only _git_checkout function from the completion file in my .bash_profile after sourcing the completion file:

_git_checkout ()
{
  __git_has_doubledash && return

  case "$cur" in
    --conflict=*)
      __gitcomp "diff3 merge" "" "${cur##--conflict=}"
      ;;
    --*)
      __gitcomp "
      --quiet --ours --theirs --track --no-track --merge
      --conflict= --orphan --patch
      "
      ;;
    *)
      # check if --track, --no-track, or --no-guess was specified
      # if so, disable DWIM mode
      local flags="--track --no-track --no-guess" track=1
      if [ -n "$(__git_find_on_cmdline "$flags")" ]; then
        track=''
      fi
      # only search local branches instead of remote branches if origin isn't
      # specified
      if [[ $cur == "origin/"* ]]; then
        __gitcomp_nl "$(__git_refs '' $track)"
      else
        __gitcomp_nl "$(__git_heads '' $track)"
      fi
      ;;
  esac
}

Answer 8

FWW here is a hack to __git_complete_refs that does the trick

__git_complete_refs ()

{ local remote track pfx cur_="$cur" sfx=" "

while test $# != 0; do
    case "$1" in
    --remote=*) remote="${1##--remote=}" ;;
    --track)    track="yes" ;;
    --pfx=*)    pfx="${1##--pfx=}" ;;
    --cur=*)    cur_="${1##--cur=}" ;;
    --sfx=*)    sfx="${1##--sfx=}" ;;
    *)      return 1 ;;
    esac
    shift
done
echo cur_ $cur_ > a
 if [[  $GIT_COMPLETION_CHECKOUT_NO_GUESS != 1 || $cur_ == "origin"* ]]; then
    __gitcomp_direct "$(__git_refs "$remote" "$track" "$pfx" "$cur_" "$sfx")"
  else
    __gitcomp_direct "$(__git_heads  "" "$cur_")"
  fi

}

Answer 9

I'm not using Git Bash myself, but if this is the same as mentioned in http://tekrat.com/2008/04/30/bash-autocompletion-git-super-lazy-goodness/, you should be able to replace git branch -a with a plain git branch in

_complete_git() {
  if [ -d .git ]; then
    branches=`git branch -a | cut -c 3-`
    tags=`git tag`
    cur="${COMP_WORDS[COMP_CWORD]}"
    COMPREPLY=( $(compgen -W "${branches} ${tags}" -- ${cur}) )
  fi
}
complete -F _complete_git git checkout

(in your .profile or similar) and get what you want.