zsh tab completion messes up command line formatting

Question

I'm running zsh with oh-my-zsh on OS X. Every time I use zsh's awesome tab-completion, formatting on the current command line prompt gets really screwed up. For example:

I'll be typing cd fo and try to tab-complete for the 'foo' directory; zsh prompts for completion but changes the command line to cd fo cd fo while it's waiting for me to complete. It's not a big deal but very annoying. Any suggestions?

Answer 1

I had the same issue on PopOS and Arch linux. I tried a bunch of solutions from various places but the only solution that worked for me was this suggestion by romkatv on an issue on the oh-my-zsh github repository.

The solution is to make a copy of the .zsh-theme file of whatever theme you're using in oh-my-zsh and surround all non-ASCII characters (like emojis) with %{%G<CHARACTER>%}

For example, the default oh-my-zsh theme robbyrussel contains 2 non-ASCII characters. The '➜' character in the prompt

PROMPT="%(?:%{$fg_bold[green]%}➜ :%{$fg_bold[red]%}➜ )"

and the '✗' character in the prompt for git directories

ZSH_THEME_GIT_PROMPT_DIRTY="%{$fg[blue]%}) %{$fg[yellow]%}✗"

Using %{%G<character>%} around the 2 non-ASCII characters like this

PROMPT="%(?:%{$fg_bold[green]%}%{%G➜%} :%{$fg_bold[red]%}%{%G➜%} )"

and this

ZSH_THEME_GIT_PROMPT_DIRTY="%{$fg[blue]%}) %{$fg[yellow]%}%{%G✗%}"

solved the issue for me.

Answer 2

I have faced the same problem before, my solution was disabling some zsh plugins. The second probability is that your colour theme may contain a bug which causing this.

# Custom plugins may be added to ~/.oh-my-zsh/custom/plugins/
# Example format: plugins=(rails git textmate ruby lighthouse)
plugins=(git)

This is the final version of my plugin section in the ~/.zshrc file. Any other plugin between parenthesis may be the reason of your situation.

If your problem still continues you need to post your ~/.zshrc to let us check what is in there.