Completion waiting dots cause prompt to disappear with multi line prompts

[chrishoage]

With completion waiting dots off:

With completion waiting dots on:

This issue is not specific to my custom theme. I have tried other multi line prompts and all have the same issue.

In the meantime I have disabled COMPLETION_WAITING_DOTS

[daneah]

I didn't experience this issue until upgrading to macOS High Sierra. I asked this StackOverflow question before finally tracing the issue to COMPLETION_WAITING_DOTS myself. Looked into that code but wasn't able to make much sense of it on first go around 😅

[mcornella]

Can you test with this modification?

expand-or-complete-with-dots() {
    print -Pn "%{%F{red}......%f%}"

    zle expand-or-complete
    zle redisplay
}
zle -N expand-or-complete-with-dots
bindkey '^I' expand-or-complete-with-dots

[daneah]

@mcornella I've just tried this and I'm still seeing the same behavior. I believe the zle redisplay is what causes this affliction, as commenting it out makes things behave roughly as I'd expect. There are obviously a few other issues that come out of just removing that, though.

[mcornella]

Sadly I can't reproduce this. Can you share your theme so I can try on my end? Also, what zsh --version are you running?

[daneah]

I'm on zsh 5.5.1 (x86_64-apple-darwin17.5.0) on macOS 10.13.4.

My theme is a fairly heavily customized one, originally started from kolo. Here's the theme.

[daneah]

I attempted to make an asciinema recording of this behavior to help you see a little more clearly what's happening, but asciinema drops you into a subshell where it seems that the completion dots don't execute (and therefore the behavior is not exhibited). I don't quite understand why that is, but sorry if that observation is just noise 😅

[shilov]

@mcornella just tried your modification and the issue is still present.

Also running zsh 5.5.1, but with the denysdovhan/spaceship-prompt theme.
As @daneah pointed out, the issue seems to be related to zle redisplay

[mcornella]

I can't reproduce the issue with either of your themes even with the same zsh version.

These are two modified versions, please try both and report if the issue persists (you can copy-paste directly into the terminal):

Version 1

expand-or-complete-with-dots() {
    # toggle line-wrapping off and back on again
    [[ -n "$terminfo[rmam]" && -n "$terminfo[smam]" ]] && echoti rmam
    print -Pn "%{%F{red}......%f%}"
    [[ -n "$terminfo[rmam]" && -n "$terminfo[smam]" ]] && echoti smam

    zle expand-or-complete
    zle -R
}
zle -N expand-or-complete-with-dots
bindkey "^I" expand-or-complete-with-dots

Version 2

expand-or-complete-with-dots() {
    # toggle line-wrapping off and back on again
    [[ -n "$terminfo[rmam]" && -n "$terminfo[smam]" ]] && echoti rmam
    print -Pn "%{%F{red}......%f%}"
    [[ -n "$terminfo[rmam]" && -n "$terminfo[smam]" ]] && echoti smam

    zle expand-or-complete
    zle reset-prompt
}
zle -N expand-or-complete-with-dots
bindkey "^I" expand-or-complete-with-dots

[daneah]

@mcornella I tried these both.

The first approach no longer overwrites the terminal prompt, but does result in the dots interrupting the line currently being typed:

ls /va.....ar/li.....ib/...../postfix/

The second approach works well unless I hit <TAB> <TAB> to cycle through argument options, i.e.:

ls /va<TAB>
ls /va...
ls /var/
ls /var/<TAB>

Doing that still exhibits the removal of the prompt.

[daneah]

Since you can't reproduce this I'm wondering if a particular plugin is to blame. I will try keeping completion dots on and turning off various plugins to see if I can narrow that down.

Edit: Turned off all plugins and behavior was still present 😕

[juanibiapina]

I have this problem as well. I don't use oh my zsh, but copied over just the COMPLETION_WAITING_DOTS part. My prompt is also custom with two lines (and right prompt as well).

[juanibiapina]

The same problem happens when using fzf for file completion. Both of these probably call zle redisplay, causing the issue. There is a workaround suggested here: https://superuser.com/questions/382503/how-can-i-put-a-newline-in-my-zsh-prompt-without-causing-terminal-redraw-issues

Also more information here: sorin-ionescu/prezto#1245

ERRATA: Actually fzf is now calling zle reset-prompt, which is also broken.

zle -R seems to work well for both cases.

[segevfiner]

This feels like a zsh/zle bug. I'm not seeing this with zsh 5.7.1 but have seen it before. We should probably figure out which zsh version or commit fixed this or maybe my prompt worked around this. I'm using spaceship prompt.

[mcornella]

Latest versions of zsh don't have this bug, so I'll close this as an upstream issue. Confirmed to be fixed in 5.7.1 and buggy in 5.3, I don't know the oldest version with a fix.

[juanibiapina]

To be more specific: this is fixed for me on zsh 5.7.1, but not when inside tmux 3.0a. I'd appreciate any ideas here.

[negebauer]

I had a similar issue and changing the locale fixed it #7558 (comment)