@ploxiln -- edited my comment explaining a lot of devs here use network mounts (in which case checking for existence takes a lot longer). I'd love to explore this though, either behind a config setting or eventually as the default behavior! What do you think?

I think to have usable matching you're going to have to go that way, unless you want to write custom parsing code for each command's output.

yeah, if the files are not either local or on an NFS mount with sub-millisecond latency (my test took ~ 1 second over NFS to a VM), it's going to take too long. I hadn't thought of that situation

You could test for a single file (possible with a timeout) and see if it's "fast enough" to check all files.

You could also check in the background and update the display if the heuristic turned out wrong.