Where is my zsh getting its git completion settings?

Question

My zsh does git completion, but I did not configure this myself. How can I figure out where these settings are coming from?

Answer 1

zsh comes with its own completion library which includes completions for Git commands. Once you enable zsh’s completion, these bundle completions will be available.

You usually enable and configure zsh completion by running compinstall (i.e. autoload -U compinstall && compinstall). It will modify your .zshrc to include autoload -Uz compinit and compinit so that completion is initialized for each instance of zsh. compinit automatically loads completions from zsh’s fpath directories (see the “Autoloaded files” section of the zshcompsys manpage).

For example, my system has two versions of zsh installed:

• /bin/zsh gets Git completions from
  /usr/share/zsh/4.3.9/functions/_git and
• /opt/local/bin/zsh gets Git completions from
  /opt/local/share/zsh/4.3.12/functions/_git.

The directories of these _git files are in the respective shell’s fpath (which also includes site-functions directory that is next to the version directory).