Autocomplete in commit dialog seems to hang with many similarly-named files

[Ian Brockbank]

Hi,

We have a (fairly large) source tree with a lot of tests.  Many of the test files in this source tree are of the form test_libxxx_yyy, where xxx is the component being tested (one of four) and yyy is the first bit which is unique.

When entering commit messages, when I start typing one of these filenames, autocomplete just seems to hang until it works out the options, even if I've typed more characters which would have reduced the option set.  It then repeats this with the next character or characters until finally it gets to a manageable set and starts responding again.

Would it be possible to make the auto-complete either asynchronous or have a timeout?  This makes it very slow going entering commit log messages.

Thanks,

Ian

[Stefan]

I did some tests myself:

the autocompletion of paths and filenames only happens with those files that are actually shown in the commit dialog. So if you have that many files shown in the commit dialog then something is seriously wrong.

* if the files are unversioned and should stay that way, mark them as ignored

* if the files are versioned but modified, consider committing them

rule of thumb: if you have to scroll more than two pages of files in the commit dialog, you're doing something wrong.

Because with so many files shown, you will someday commit the wrong file, forget to include a file in a commit (because you overlooked it in those many files), include files in a commit that you shouldn't have or worse, forget to add an unversioned files to version control and commit it.

my tests included a list of 8000 files - the autocompletion box took only 500ms to show. While that is annoying when typing, you should take it as a hint to maybe adjust your workflow.

if you can't adjust your workflow, you can specify the number of chars it takes to trigger the autocompletion: the default is three chars, but you can set that to e.g. 6 or even higher:

Settings-Advanced->AutoCompleteMinChars

Set that to a value that works better for you.