`git push origin --delete <TAB>` completes to `origin/foo`, but `origin/foo` is
a LOCAL remote-tracking name — the ref on the server is just `foo`. So the
command zsh completes for you is the one git rejects, and it rejects it with
"remote ref does not exist", which reads as "that branch is gone" rather than
"you named it wrong".
The second half is worse, because it makes the first half look intermittent:
without pruning, `git branch -r` and the completion keep offering branches that
were deleted on the server weeks ago. Then some completions fail because the
branch is genuinely gone and others fail because of the prefix, with identical
error text.
Two fixes, one per cause:
- `fetch.prune = true` globally, so stale remote-tracking refs are dropped on
every fetch/pull and dead branches stop being offered at all.
- `grmb`, which takes either form, prunes first, and reports per-branch rather
than aborting the batch. `grmb origin/foo` and `grmb foo` both work.
Named grmb rather than the more obvious gbd because oh-my-zsh's git plugin
already binds gbd to `git branch --delete`. Aliases resolve before functions,
so the collision would not have errored — it would have silently tried to
delete a LOCAL branch when the whole point is the remote one. Caught by
`type gbd` after installing; check any new g* helper the same way.
grmb deliberately does not wrap `git push` itself — intercepting a git
subcommand to rewrite its arguments is the kind of thing that works until it
silently does the wrong thing to a refspec someone meant literally.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Cross-distro (RHEL/Debian) VM setup: zsh + oh-my-zsh with a self-healing
bash fallback for environments that reset the root filesystem or hardcode
bash for new terminals (e.g. Kasm Workspaces), plus git identity and
HTTPS credential-store configuration.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
noconnorandClaude Opus 5