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Comment by radarsat1 | Hacker News Reader

I feel really alone being happy without autocomplete. Doesn't anyone else find it annoying and distracting to have your IDE or editor constantly throwing "suggestions" at you? I am quite happy with that feature turned off.

I guess I do use it in Python REPL quite often though. But there at least you have to prompt it by pressing tab.

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As someone who heavily uses not only autocomplete but also Resharper and GitHub Copilot, I sorta reject the premise of the question. It is annoying, but it's still worth it even so. I have to deal with IntelliSense, Copilot, and Resharper all fighting with each other and I think there's a lot of room for improvement in that interaction. But including the time spent fighting with them, I'm still writing code much faster. Ten steps forward, one step back. With standard code completion especially, most of the time I'm not looking at the things popping up, I'm using it via muscle memory; I know what the completion will be, so I just type the prompt and hit tab, I don't wait to see a popup.

I can't link for hopefully obvious reasons

In user studies it was found that beginner/novice coders (or really, users that aren't SWEs) autocompletion was the most requested feature for improvement in IDE support. It's foundational for understanding what they can write and making sure it's valid.

And that makes sense to me, if you have a lot of experience in a codebase and ecosystem it's not as important. If you don't then typing `.` and seeing a bunch of aptly named methods show up, then snippet completion for their arguments to tab through them, you are immediately productive. Autocomplete turns known unknowns into known knowns.

I feel the same for every LSP feature. They're all useful, but I must specifically ask for them or they're too annoying. The only exception is diagnostics which is fine to show a small marker in it's line, though they also get annoying if the description is expanded without explicitly asking.

I think I'm with you in that I like autocomplete but I want to ask for it; prompting feels too busy.

Agreed! Always-on autocomplete feels like the editor equivalent of someone asking "are we there yet?" every few seconds during a road trip.

Just today I had the following interaction with Outlook's web interface:

    Me: I want to type "Hi Andrew,"
    Outlook's autocomplete: I see an <H>, I see an <i>...
    Oh, oh, I know this one! Do you want me to autocomplete "Hi" for you?
    <space>? You do! I'm helping!

and I'm left getting two characters out of my three key presses in a frustratingly unexpected way.

I set the delay to 8 seconds. If I stop and think about a line for too long, then I get autocomplete.. but if I'm just pausing to prepare my next batch of code, it doesn't get in the way.

It's a good middleground.

I am in a similar position actually -- I don't find autocomplete to be the main feature of IDE, it doesn't add that much over dumb hippie-expand. Code navigation is much more important.

100,000% this.

If I could get the navigation and analysis (go to def/decl/parent/etc., show/jump to uses/children/impls/etc.) all on its own, without auto-complete, type hints, or syntax highlighting, I'd be a pretty happy camper.

I'm fine with features that are on-demand (on-demand completion, type info, actions, etc.). They add occasional value without distraction.

About the only other things I care about in a development environment are compile output navigation (optionally with isolated warnings & errors, but full output is mandatory), configurable run and tooling integration (doesn't need to be close integration, either, just flexible and configurable).

Gravy/Frosting (depending upon your preferred metaphor) would be debugger and documentation integration. Both are hard to do well, and can usually be accomplished using a decent run/tooling interface.

> Doesn't anyone else find it annoying and distracting to have your IDE or editor constantly throwing "suggestions" at you?

I see where this is coming from. That's why I do not let neovim hit me with completions all the time, but only when I request them. Most of the time, I can work with the (neo)vim builtins, like "complete word" or "complete line" and do not even use the language-server provided semantic autocompletion. But when I need to, it is only two keystrokes away.

Me too. I have turned off auto complete in company-mode. Instead I bind a key shortcut to do it manually on demand when I need it. It works great.

The main value I've seen from it is in CodeBasesWithReallyLongNamingConventions.

I'm glad that LSP exists, and I've got it hooked into vim... but autocomplete is seldom very useful to me. It's usually faster to just type the thing out.

How do you work in new codebases?

Do you remember all those properties, method names, like wtf? how?

You're not alone! =)

good to know! there are dozens of us!

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