Opening file picker in large repo takes excessively long

[joshuawarner32]

Summary

The file picker seems to load the entire git repository, which in my case has ~500K files (i.e. half a million). It takes about 10 seconds to load the file picker.

There's obviously only so much optimization that can actually be done here - find . >/dev/null alone takes 13 seconds for me.

A few thoughts on possible improvements:

• git ls-tree -r HEAD --name-only takes only 400ms - much better, tho still longer than I'd like
• Ideally there could be a setting to only pick files under the current directory - which in my case is much smaller than the entire repo
• This list should hopefully be handled by some daemon and asynchronously kept up to date. In my case, watchman is already running - maybe there could be an integration there?

Reproduction Steps

I tried this:

1. hx
2. type <space>, <f> to load the file picker
3. wait

I expected this to happen:

File picker should load in "interactive" time - definitely under a second, ideally under 100ms

Instead, this happened:

I had to wait

Helix log

~/.cache/helix/helix.log

please provide a copy of `~/.cache/helix/helix.log` here if possible, you may need to redact some of the lines

~/.cache/helix/helix.log is empty (but exists)
hx -h confirms this the correct path.

Platform

macOS 12.3

Terminal Emulator

iTerm2 v3.4.15

Helix Version

helix 22.03 (d4e45fd)

[the-mikedavis]

duplicate of #1707