I used to think this way, too, so I don’t think you’re weird. At my old workplace, everyone else was a Java IDE wizard, and I was used to good old-fashioned text editors. Aren’t you distracted by that widget appearing while you’re typing, I thought? Is it really faster for you to hit the Down arrow three times instead of just typing ‘empty’? Do people not learn the libraries they’re using anymore‽

But over time, something changed, and I’m now a big fan of autocomplete interfaces. There was something wrong with my initial assumptions, and I think that’s the same assumption you make when you say this:

> i can type “empty()” on the keyboard faster than I can look at a screen and choose “empty()” from a list

You’re right, I can type ‘empty()’ faster than selecting it from a list. I have the muscle memory already there, and I don’t need to stop and look and think about which method I’m autocompleting.

The reason I still use autocomplete is not that I need my IDE to tell me that there’s an ‘empty’ method there as if that’s something I don’t already know, but to tell me that my assumption that ‘myVector’ has an ‘empty’ method is correct!

I occasionally write code like this:

    auto myVector = someFunction();
    if (myVector->empty()) { 
        fillVector(myVector); 
    }

Only to find that ‘myVector’ is not actually a vector, but an optional<vector> or another type entirely that requires me to do something else to get the vector I want. At this point, if I start typing ‘empty’ and the autocomplete widget does not appear, I immediately know that I’m not dealing with the type I thought I was.

Once I started programming this way, having the window appear was not ever a distraction, because I expected it to appear. In fact, the only distraction was when it stopped appearing, when I’ve made a mistake!