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I'm new to zsh and I'm trying to figure out how to get tab completion to work so that when I typed part of the name of a file that's not in the current directory zsh will complete it.

The idea is that I have some scripts in ~ and c:\MyStuff\bin and I'd love for zsh to try and complete those (executable) scripts when I'm in other directories.

Being able to complete files that are anywhere in my path would be nice, but if it's easier to complete files using a list of directories set in my .zshrc, well, that would work fine too.

If anyone has any pointers for resources about how to do this, or even advice like "This will / won't work in zsh" that would be great. zsh seems open-ended enough that it ought to be able to do this AND ALSO I've searched long enough without finding anything that I wouldn't be surprised if there's nothing at the end of this rabbit hole :)

Thanks in advance!

MikeTheTall
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1 Answers1

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So I decided to invest the time and actually try and read the (very, very thorough) zsh completion docs. There's a lot there, including a section which says that zsh actually does this out of the box:

8 Command Execution

"...the shell searches each element of $path for a directory containing an executable file by that name..."

Turns out this does work for me, it just takes a long time (more than a second or two) and so I thought it wasn't working.

Next up: looking at why it's taking so long - perhaps it's my very long $path variable :)

MikeTheTall
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