Slow glossary command

[N4M3Z]

Running glossary command seems very slow on my system (zsh 5.0.7 x86_64-apple-darwin14.0.0). I only have one user defined function. Is this expected?

cite                                                                  creates one or more meta keywords for use in your functions
draft                                                                 wraps command from history into a new function, default is last
                                                                      command
glossary                                                              displays help summary for all functions, or summary for a group of
                                                                      functions
metafor                                                               prints function metadata associated with keyword
ping.google                                                           Test connection via Google DNS (8.8.8.8)
reference                                                             displays apidoc help for a specific function
revise                                                                loads function into editor for revision
write                                                                 writes one or more composed function definitions to stdout
15.5386480000s elapsed

[erichs]

@N4M3Z: yikes! so, frameworks like ohmyzsh and tools like rvm add a lot of shell functions, which will slow glossary down. My glossary run is certainly faster, but not, say an order of magnitude faster.

One obvious approach to making this faster is to pre-render the reference and glossary data, following a draft or revise.

Given four functions: clone, commits, tophogs and weather, split among two groups git and misc, I imagine the pre-rendered glossary data could be kept in the following directory structure within the .composure directory:

.
├── clone.inc
├── commits.inc
├── glossary
│   ├── clone.gloss
│   ├── commits.gloss
│   ├── git.list
│   ├── misc.list
│   ├── tophogs.gloss
│   └── weather.gloss
├── tophogs.inc
├── weather.inc

the lists themselves could be trivially sorted when glossary <group> is called, and the .gloss files displayed. I suspect this would make things much faster indeed.

[N4M3Z]

I am using zgen myself, but I do have nvm, rvm and assorted plugins installed, so I guess that would be the issue behind this. Given your comment on speeding things up, are you planning to do this change yourself?

[erichs]

It may be a few weeks until I can give this some attention. If you're willing to work on it sooner, I'd happily take a PR!

[N4M3Z]

I would be willing to work on it sooner, but I am not sure where to start? If you can drop a few more suggestions, I could look into the code and figure out if I have to power to tackle this.

[N4M3Z]

Another minor suggestion would be to alias composure.sh to composure.plugin.zsh as this will make this package automatically compatible with zgen, antigen and oh-my-zsh.

[erichs]

@N4M3Z: interesting suggestion! I'll consider that.

What I was thinking above is to rewrite the glossary() function, extracting the portion that generates the glossary lines, and putting that into a new function, let's call it _gloss_function(). This function would take a function name as an argument. It would generate the .gloss file inside the $(_get_composure_dir)/glossary directory. If it detected one or more lines of group metadata for the function, it would also add the function name to a unique, sorted list stored in the same directory, with a groupname.list convention. So, if a function specified:

myfunc() {
  group foo
  group bar
}

Then myfunc would appear in glossary/foo.list and glossary/bar.list.

_gloss_function() could then be called at the bottom of the revise() function, like:

revise() {
  ...
    printf '%s\n' 'zero-length file, revision aborted!'
  fi
  command rm "$temp"
  _gloss_function "$func"
}

glossary() could then be re-written, something like:

glossary() {
  typeset glossdir=$(_get_composure_dir)/glossary
  typeset group="$1"
  if [ -n "$group" ]; then 
    for func in $(cat $glossdir/$group.list); do
      cat $glossdir/$func.gloss
    done
  else
    for func in $(ls $glossdir/*.gloss | sort); do
      cat $glossdir/$func.gloss
    done
  fi
}