Microsoft please get your tab to autocomplete shit together | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft please get your tab to autocomplete shit together

ivanca.github.io

251 pointsAmbroseBierce152 comments

This is actually bearable compared to the new terminal suggestions in vscode. Not only does it autosuggest bizzare completions for commands, it breaks shell completions. So when I tab a file path, it shoves the absolute path into the partially typed path making it unusable.

I thought I was going crazy, but it started feeling materially worse sometime in last few weeks.

Nope, not crazy. Pretty much solely used it for years but got a lazyvim* setup last week

Still has excellent integrated debugging and is more familiar than nvim, but it has really started to get in its own way the past couple minor versions

*Not "lazy I'm" (though perhaps I am for letting that slide)

after two decades my muscle memory in the terminal is pretty important. that + with keyboard shortcuts ive had multiple jobs ask me to "slow down" when doing screenshares as everything moves so fast.

Yeah for anyone else (especially Mac and Linux users) who recently had this frustration thrust upon you: Go into VSCode settings and search for terminal integration > uncheck.

The specific setting is `terminal.integrated.suggest.enabled`.

Ohh, that's what has been happening when I've had tab completion fail recently! Thanks for mentioning it...

It’s so weird, vscode worked flawlessly for me for years and after migrating to neovim a month or two ago I keep seeing complains.

Has there been a change lately and in the project, or is it just internet bias?

Recent changes have been a little invasive. The terminal auto complete was a week or so ago, and the popular Gitlens extension also recently pushed a really poor rebase interface. Besides those two in the last weeks, I can't remember any time VS Code has messed up my workflows so badly.

I remember thinking wtf when Python import suggestions became disabled by default.

https://github.com/microsoft/pylance-release/issues/3579

Copilot

If you like nvim you'd probably be interested in helix (https://helix-editor.com/) too

I've seen some weird breakage recently in vscode. The C++ support failing to parse sources correctly (for LLVM), Rust debugging no longer showing vectors properly. Not sure if this is some bizarre interaction with my setup (which is pretty vanilla Ubuntu) or a regression in basic functionality brought on by an over-emphasis on AI features.

It is worrying that for many months now, pretty much all the content of changelogs has been about AI.

It does weird stuff. I've bitched about it do much to my workmates until they disabled autoformat features wich cause 5k line conflicts in SCM. I'm ysing codium which also does Clippy dmart stuff trying to be helpful and breaks code. They keep pushing AI junk and break functionality to the point that I'm looking for another editor with usable muliple cursors (not *vim and not helix which breaks my vim muscle memory).

They broke it again today with release 1.107 which throwns a weird shadow when I resize the window in Gnome. Got fed up with it, so I pinned the package to 1.106.

I don’t know if this is related, but for me the terminal is broken and causes VS Code to crash. It only happens after a command finishes executing and before the shell prompts again

Ha, was going to come here to complain! It completely breaks my up arrow is history search based on typed chars. First thing I do on a Linux box (and it will blow your mind) is put this in ~/.inputrc :

    "\e[A": history-search-backward
    "\e[B": history-search-forward
    "\e[C": forward-char
    "\e[D": backward-char

If you think that you can just start "enhancing" people's terminal experience like it's a Windows 11 taskbar, I don't think you understand terminal users. It's all good, but make it opt in via some config file (i.e. ~/.bashrc)!

Hi from the VS Code team - I recently went into detail about why we did this in https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/282268#issuecomme.... We believe it'll be beneficial overall and go a long way in lowering the bar to make the terminal less intimidating for newcomers. Conflicts with muscle memory was always a big concern which is why we made extra effort to be able to turn it off, the comment below that one outlines some steps we're making to make it more easily configurable inline.

On the roll out side, this is what we observed:

- It was enabled in Insiders for several months, generally only very positive reactions - It was surprising to me that we shipped this to 25% of our stable users and basically no one complained for 2 weeks before we rolled out to 100% - After hitting 100% of users we did see some backlash like this comment - Of course telemetry doesn't show the whole story, but we try to determine both whether the completion was modified and whether the command was successful after using it and both numbers stayed relatively stable since shipping in Insiders at what we consider pretty good numbers (both accept without editing and command success rate is ~80%).

It's scary to see how Microsoft tracks every single of our keystrokes in vscode.

Location, location, location.

The feedback you receive is from a selection of people who’re trying new features, not people with existing patterns that is broken one of a sudden with an update while they’re trying to get stuff done.

Nobody at Microsoft has ever used this with WSL, and doing a "cd /", and getting autocomplete for "$RecycleBin" and other windows paths? It completely breaks bash autocomplete, and every single suggestion is completely wrong, in every single command i type.

I, and probably most uses, just hoped this going away as soon as possible again.

One of the things we should definitely action is hiding it in more places where it doesn't work well, that's one of the key pieces of feedback we got and is tracked in https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/282578

For that WSL one specifically we'll get it fixed in https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/285037

Thanks for actioning it bro.

I've had to take a beat to find the right words as all the frustration in the issue ticket impacted me too which has left a very bad taste in my mouth after being initially curious and open to the new feature.

I think you're doing a disservice to newcomers by creating a new method of autocompletion. And I say that as somebody who has mentored a lot of newcomers in high school, University, and now professionally. Very often, including just yesterday, I'll hear something like "I don't really know how to use [very standard thing], we had [esoteric helper] instead." Yesterday it was for makefiles. Their school just abstracted it away to make it easier for them, so they don't know how to make a simple makefile to compile a few source files together. Or literally any other build system, including cmake. So, Lord have mercy on my soul if I have a new hire tell me "I don't know how to use the regular terminals. All I can use is VSCode's terminal." I think sometimes things should be hard, but I don't think terminal autocomplete is very hard. Just hit tab a few times and it'll do its thing or -h.

Where it might come in handy, and I haven't tested this, is programs that haven't registered their completions. For example, I'm often cross compiling, and it would be nice if it knew that ...-objcopy had the same completion as the host objcopy. But I am not going to take the hit of the bad pathing just for that.

I'll conclude with a lesson in biases: your insiders are biased. You need to recognize that only egregious errors might be statistically significant. Not only are they more power users, they're new feature hunters, and more than that, they want new VSCode features. Also, that's very creepy y'all are looking at my command success rate even though I'm not an insider. And if you look at the issue ticket, you'll see that a lot of the issues wouldn't cause failure. `Git add` on the wrong file isn't a negative return code, and they might just muscle memory press enter before seeing they need to edit. A possibly better metric is how many times did the user run the same command up to the completion point. But please don't collect that data, that's creepy. I'm going to have to look through my settings to try and turn that all off.

> So, Lord have mercy on my soul if I have a new hire tell me "I don't know how to use the regular terminals. All I can use is VSCode's terminal." I think sometimes things should be hard, but I don't think terminal autocomplete is very hard. Just hit tab a few times and it'll do its thing or -h.

Thanks for the insights. Something I've learned here is that the vast majority of users don't change their defaults or seek out features they may find very useful. Discoverability vs simplicity/bloat is a hard problem and that's essentially the issue here.

I made a note on the issue that with the planned changes to make it easier to configure, we should consider not overriding tab by default anymore. That would mean that only down arrow is bound by default which would then put focus into the widget.

> I'm going to have to look through my settings to try and turn that all off.

Full details at https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/configure/telemetry, but setting `"telemetry.telemetryLevel": "off"` will disable usage/crash/error telemetry for the VS Code core. Just keep in mind extensions may or may not respect that.

Here's that specific event if you're interested: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/blob/b0e9dce905d12646801...

While I agree that new feature adoption is hard, changing tab completion is a bit hardcore. I agree that a different key bind, maybe right arrow key, or shift tab, or something would have been better.

Here's a suggestion: maybe you could not track all of our activity extremely invasively by default, and allow those who would like to provide feedback and tracking to enable it on their own. Crazy thought, I know.

I agree with the point that making the VS Code terminal behave in a special manner without opt-in is going to be disruptive to newer engineers. Why not make it a shell plugin instead and offer to install/customize the shell the first time someone launches a new shell in VS Code instead? Then it changes it system wide, like oh-my-zsh or something would.

> I think you're doing a disservice to newcomers by creating a new method of autocompletion

Or a feature to lock users into their tools?

No, it's really not that good a feature and turning it off improves my experience so I don't care if they're the only ones with it. That said, if it's part of the open source, when better. And even if it was, I can't complain that a business made a program has a unique feature to attract users.

The insane behavior in the post is not that you get fancy completions, but that the completion does not match the preview. If the computer starts doing A when you asked it B, it is equivalent to a trash can.

This a byproduct of metric-driven development. The result is a creepy manifestation of force-fed features backed by "telemetry" (action and result logging, and sometimes keystroke or string logging), but I don't place any blame on this developer; this is the way it has been at that company for a while and that horse has long since left the barn.

Certainly this may not even be intended gesture, but it will result in unknowable metric of users being insulted by the half-baked forced nature of these product changes.

First of all, I appreciate and respect you coming here and defending your choices. That said:

I think that bar-lowering is not really something that Terminal users want, if they wanted simplicity they wouldn't be in a terminal in the first place, at least that holds true for a large portion of the Terminal users.

Sure there are always the new users, who may benefit from some hand-holding. But why don't you ask first if people want their hand held? Normal terminal users are looking for a way to control their computer in a more direct fashion, which makes them faster. They seek a more predictable interface, by moving closer to the true language of the computer itself, by learning a bit about how it works inside and subsequently adapting oneself to it.

You have chosen to alienate a large group of highly knowledgeable users for a user group that may be mostly a myth.

What would make more sense is to provide a switch for "noob mode", while leaving the core experience alone. I for one already hate the difference between my normal terminal when it comes to ctrl-c/ctrl-v and pasting with select/middle-click. This current change feels like a slap in my face.

I appreciate the effort you put into developing this. However, I'm honestly shocked you received only positive reactions. I booted up my system today and found that it made terminal nearly unusable. The old tab-complete behavior gets you to the branch point you want fast, minimizing typing time. The new behavior quickly shoots past the relevant branch point, meaning I spend considerable effort going back to edit commands.

Also, speaking as an educator, I think there might be a misunderstanding about what makes things intimidating for new users. Systems that make specific decisions without being able to easily control them makes things more intimidating, not less. And if I'm reading your post correctly, it sounds like you are trying to introduce a feature on newcomers, but your internal testing was done on insiders and stable users -- a different population.

Frankly, at this point I may strongly discourage all of my students from using VSCode.

Don't get me started on powershell!

For one, it's the right arrow key for complete for most things (but tab for others).

But by FAR the worst thing is that often times you'll type a command and try to tab/arrow complete an argument, and the module/dll or whatever is not loaded into memory, and so theres some blocking operation and loads the module which takes 10+ seconds. This happens to me almost every day.

I do love powershell otherwise though, after 20+ years in bash, there is actually some things to like about it.

I have a deep and abiding love of Powershell but you are spot on.

It is amazing until you run into one of these insane behaviors that somehow nobody ever fixed.

(Some are actually fixed finally in 7.x - like issues with filenames with grave characters in them)

I like PowerShell too, but in what universe other than ours (clearly the worst one) is it even possible for loading a module to take more time than the blink of an eye?

Microsoft should find it embarrassing how long it takes powershell to load a module. Pushing <tab> to autocomplete a cmdlet name should never take more than maybe 100 milliseconds.

Reminds of why I sold my Windows. One day I just had enough of things breaking in all the colors of the rainbow.

For every problem I have on my macOS, some poor Windows user have experienced 50 non-Googleable errors. I do like Powershell though.

Loading times surely is not a problem unique to Powershell. The more complex and advanced a software gets, the more it takes to load data into RAM that appears to the user redundant.

This is the most noticable with startup times. My favorite software (Firefox) has this solved; it opens up in reasonable amounts of time, even if it takes a moment after to show the first website. My second favorite software (Inkscape), meanwhile, takes so long just to show the main UI that the developers didn't think anything of adding a splash screen: an overt acknowledgement that you're keeping the user waiting.

I, too, wish that everything were more lean and snappy, but clearly this is still an unsolved problem.

If you like Powershell but have some complaints, you might find nushell to be the best of both worlds. My elevator pitch for it would be imagine the object-oriented / typed nature of Powershell, minus the verbosity and windows-centric design of it. As someone who develops on and for windows computers, nushell is a real breath of fresh air.

I have a command line program at work which outputs json. Pure JSON in all situations.

I thought nushell would be able to make sense of that and display it semi-nicely.

Nushell pukes on it, errors out, and doesn’t even show the output of the command. As far as sins go for a shell, not showing the output of the program it just ran is very high among them.

nushell had its chance with me.

With external commands you might have to collect the output of the program before doing any sort of manipulation. I’ve been got by this before too; the fix is simple (for me at least). `external.exe | collect | from json` et voila

This doesn't look like a pit of success design.

Well, every shell has its quirks and gotchas. I’ve found nushell’s to be the least intrusive and most workable thus far.

Whenever someone recommends nushell, I feel like I have to point out that its table output (a core feature) is broken:

https://github.com/nushell/nushell/issues/13601

https://github.com/nushell/nushell/issues/16379

Powershell right arrow is madness… just found out F2 shows all the options though and finally it’s a little more tolerable

Been the case since forever. Very annoying

If you want to bind Tab to Accept suggestions:

Set-PSReadLineKeyHandler -Chord "Tab" -Function AcceptSuggestion

I don’t know what it is but I think commpletion across editors has gotten so much worse. Even PyCharm now routinely completes some hallucinated method or library. Even with AI completions off I feel like it still somehow got dumber since 2023.

Nobody is dogfooding the non-AI versions of autocomplete anymore is my best guess

It's because Tab accepts copilot suggestion, you have to press Enter instead to accept the language server suggestion.

Yes, and what a mess it has been.

Intellisense + Intellicode + Roslynator (extension) combined were really the height of productivity in Visual Studio. Now they've driven a steam-roller over all of that, forced CoPilot down our throats.

I LIKE CoPilot's "chat" interface, and agents are fine too (although Claude in VS Code is tons better), but CoPilot auto-complete is negative value and shouldn't be used.

I hate the time unpredictability of it. Intellij also has AI completion suggestions, and sometimes they're really useful. But sometimes when I expect them, they don't come. Or they briefly flash and then disappear.

What would be nice is if you could ask for a suggestion with one key, so it's there when I want it, and not when I don't. That would put me in control. Instead I feel subjected to these completely random whims of the AI.

Huh I'm the opposite. I find the copilot chat slow and low value compared to ChatGPT. But I use the tab autocomplete a lot.

Otoh I disabled all the intellisense stuff so I don't have the issues described in TFA: tab is always copilot autocomplete for whatever it shows in grey.

Same. copilot auto complete with powershell seems better than cursors given by how often I use each

Do people know you can turn copilot off?

Alright, he's just holding it wrong.

Why can't all the suggestions come through the same UI element? That's beyond my understanding.

You'd get suggestions from,

- multiple language servers

- matches from the same buffer/project or sibling pane (tab,window, whatever you call it)

- matches from the dictionary

Reminds me of Windows Search.

It's been botched since they added ads to the Start Menu.

Pretty soon VSCode will show you intellisense ads in the list of code completions.

Windows Search requires a DNS lookup, and HTTP request to start your search, as a direct result if either one of those is slow the whole UI lags and hangs. It hasn't ever been fixed in Windows 11.

Also, there is a RegX way of disabling "bing" for-real in the search but they released an update that caused doing so to break search entirely if that was set (totally a coincidence I'm sure).

I have resorted to installing my laptop with Ireland / English & later switching the region to US / English. That way it's considered part of the European Economic Area.

Which allows me to disable web search in start, disable widgets, etc.

I use this script here and it will remove the stupid bing search feature.

https://github.com/musman96/win11debloat

> Windows Search requires a DNS lookup

WHY? Why? Why. I’m seriously asking. Who thought that was a good idea? Who?! FIRE THEM.

NO USER ever in the history of Windows users ever said: “I want to search the contents of my computer, but windows search is too fast; can you please make windows search extremely slow, make it omit things that I know exist, and also make it search the internet? Also, I want you to index my laptop while it is sleeping in my bag, making my bag very hot, and using up all my battery trying to cool down so that I have no battery left when I open up the laptop.”

No one has ever asked for that, but we have it, we’ve had it for a long damn time.

BECAUSE ads that's why. They could have had the sense and respect for their users to make it async.

This started before suggestions in the start menu.

Odd capitalization detected: might indicate that commenter is older with opinions stronger and more frequent than normal.

The "odd capitalization" was humor related to the parent comment's "odd capitalization".

The best thing about windows 11 is that if you hit the windows key, and type 'restart', it searches for 'restart' on Bing.

Please give me the name, rank, and serial number of the PM who thought this was a good idea. I will use all my meager fortune to make sure that nobody will want to hire them for PM work ever again.

Try and search for 'recycle bin' and you get zero local results in Windows 11. Unless you've gone and manually added the desktop icon into you Start menu items.

30 years ago, Win95 introduced the Recycle Bin. Maybe, just maybe, you should have made it discoverable via the Start menu by now?

I'd say that's the second best, after "there's probably a 5-10% chance the start menu search doesn't actually pop up correctly in the first place"

Easiest I've found is Windows+X, then 'u' for 'Shut Down or Restart' then 'r' for retart. Win+X, u, r.

> Windows Search requires a DNS lookup, and HTTP request to start your search, as a direct result if either one of those is slow the whole UI lags and hangs. It hasn't ever been fixed in Windows 11.

The fix is called Linux.

I was surprised when I saw that in Windows 11 Safe Mode, the Start Menu appeared to have two forms: the first of which would not appear to show typing, but then it would be replaced with the other layout after a lag with the query in the input box and the results populated.

I'm convinced that the win10 Start Menu was the single worst thing microsoft inflicted upon us in that OS. I imagine that particular discussion went like this:

Exec1:"We have a semi decent os with a refreshingly updated UI that should stay relevant for a decade. How can we make it better?"

Exec2: "why not replace the perfectly good start menu we have with an ugly, oddly proportioned rectangle with animated ads for our products."

Exec3: "Sounds great! Just make sure it has a quarter of the information density of the old one and takes up twice the screen space."

I haven't used Win11 enough to discover how they have managed to further degrade the experience, but at least it looks nicer.

Do you remember the windows 8 full screen start menu?

i miss the wondows 8 inking tools. loved that for drawing system diagrams and flow charts:'(

I used it and it was alright. They made it optionally not full screen in Windows 8.1 quickly too.

When Windows Phone was a thing, those live tiles were amazing. Those giant squares in the Win10 start menu were live tiles.

Such a shame that so few applications on Win10 made use of them.

Never saw the point of them. I prefer static content, something which most web designers can't wrap their heads around.

Easy navigation is something Mac sucks at for no good reason. I don't know why Windows is trying to degrade their advantage.

They never made sense for desktop interfaces with a keyboard and mouse. Information density is usually preferred, because we have big screens and precise, fast input.

I don’t know how you think live tiles worked but they showed you information from an application without launching the application. You just open the start menu and you’d see all the current info from those applications at a glance, whether they were running or not, no clicking required.

They took up 10x more space than they need to. And we had the information thing way, way before.

I can see the weather on my taskbar right now in KDE, no app launch required. Except it's not a giant 1 inch by 1 inch square plastered on my start menu. It's a little text showing me a cloud and temperature.

Also, live tiles just did not work a lot of the time. Most of the time, when you looked at them, it would just show the icon surrounded by a sea of color, like a little island. I'm assuming because the daemon is either not running or has ridiculously slow start up time, whereas the start menu might only be open for fractions of a second.

It took me a few hours to make the start menu looks like this: https://i.ibb.co/R4pgrwBx/start-menu.png

Now it's clean, doesn't show any web results when I start typing there: https://i.ibb.co/KpNptJTq/start-menu2.png

It also starts instantly every time (that requires removing Edge and web results from there). I use it as an app launcher only. The only missing touch is a fuzzy search but I can live without it.

I've spent too much time on it. There are tools that do it for you if you trust them (like Windhawk).

>>I haven't used Win11 enough to discover how they have managed to further degrade the experience, but at least it looks nicer.

It's an anti-pattern over anti-pattern over anti-pattern. There is a trap waiting for you at every corner. At this point it's hard to imagine them not losing the whole consumer PC market to Apple and maybe some gaming friendly Linux distros. It will take a decade or so but once the snowball starts it will not turn back. I don't think it's only about power users only. They forced S0 sleep but didn't are about making sure it doesn't crash the system because of some misbehaving driver or failed Windows update. Normal users don't like seeing everything gone and the computer restarting when they open the lid. That doesn't happen on Macs. It won't happen on Valve sponsored Linux distro either.

Was the original menu so bad? Your one has zero discoverability, which is the main feature of the old menu, and something which was degraded, but not completely killed off on the newer versions.

I don't need discoverability. I know what I have on my computer. I need it to be reliable, fast and not distract me with junk. Maybe most people need discoverability, the problem is that with the new design all they will discover is ads for Microsoft's products :)

>>Was the original menu so bad?

The original has ads, flashy banners and opens with lag half the time. Yes, it's that bad.

It boggles my mind how broken this has become.

Windows Vista/7, search was instant and correct (modulo hard drive speed and RAM). Then Windows 10 came along, I click a local result, half the time it takes forever to open Explorer, or nothing happens, or there's no results once it does open.

By the way, things still work correctly and instantly with OpenShell, so something still works underneath whatever shit veneer has coated the shell

Let me fix the title: Microsoft, please get your shit together

I tried to help a relative set up a new Windows PC recently and had to give up. Everything was confusing and/or broken, and for the first time I am ready to just send them to Apple while they can still return it. A literal brand new PC with nothing installed, and after logging in, clicking Explorer in the task bar doesn't work and I have to reboot and try again? I'm not even angry, just disappointed.

Did you know there's no more Office, they literally call it Microsoft Copilot 365 now? Like, I've been through shades of this before (".NET", anyone?) but it's a thoroughly unhinged clusterfuck on an entirely different level now.

Oh, I'd say AI is rotting our brains, all right...

> It's been botched since they added ads to the Start Menu.

Sounds like botched since they botched it

There was a time when if you edited documentation in vscode and had copilot on it would complete internal user and project names when it encountered a path on some.random LLM project we were building. I could find people and their projects by just googling the username and contextual keywords.

We all had a lot of laughs with tab auto complete and wondered in anticipation what ridiculous stuff it threw up next.

My favourite is always:

breakpoint( and then some nonsense arguments.

Apparently a good chunk of the code that these LLMs are trained on is python, yet setting a debugging breakpoint still causes difficulties.

I wonder if 30% of their code being written by AI has anything to do with it

30% of code written by AI, but 100% of tools must be enshittified with the terrible and behind Microsoft Copilot even if it means you will blow up the goodwill for VS Code in a matter of months

Someone needs to bring back the old "Windows [Aero] Task Force" website from back in the Vista/XP days that listed every minor UI/UX annoyance in Windows.

And Jobs knows we need something like that for macOS and iOS too now.

Link to context if there’s interest, there was a macOS equivalent back in the day: https://istartedsomething.com/20080811/launching-aqua-taskfo...

Don’t bother clicking the links in the post, domains are squatted.

Change to real Visual Studio for C#. Visual Studio Code is complete garbage in comparison.

Visual Studio started to enshitify as well

dunno if you tried VS2026 C#, but it's worse. I have no extensions (besides the default Copilot) and it's a never ending battle of just trying to get the normal intellisense to show up. What's worst is that the copilot autocomplete suggestions fill in made up methods/properties. Why can't it look at intellisense to get the real ones?

I've switched everything except WinForms to VS Code because Visual Studio is becoming a second rate citizen. Where are the first party extensions for Claude Code or Codex? Why is GitHub Copilot in Visual Studio always weeks behind the VS Code version?

*Rider

Visual Studio has been doing wacky stuff to me like this when I am trying to start a LINQ statement and type a letter to be the lambda variable like Select(f => … but when I hit ‘f’ it just autocompletes some random model from some .NET api that starts with F that I then have to delete because why would I want FileStreamCombulator right now I’m trying to start a lambda??? and don’t remember it doing this in the past.

I switched from Sublime to VSCode years ago and have been fairly happy but the recent AI onslaught in VSCode is making me look at other editors.

Reading all the comments surprises me, have vscode turned this bad? Why? What lowered their quality standard this much?

it's nothing short of amazing for me.

it's very fast. Boots within 1s for me even for large projects.

Has a zillion extensions. Some of which you won't see in any other editor, or at least with the same quality. Like the powerful playwright integration for example.

LLMs can one-shot most small VSCode extensions when I need some niche functionality.

GitHub/Copilot integration is soo good I develop small features by speaking to my computer and even my phone because I can fire agents with voice instructions.

Jetbrains IDEs used to be my goto editors and before that neovim.

But it's so easy to customise and extend VSCode that I can't see myself going back.

Looks like Unity code. Not sure if it’s Visual Studio or VS Code, but yeah, it was baffling to me how weirdly bad C# support in either IDE is. Maybe something wrong with my setup, but autocompletions indeed suck (in addition to just wrong picks, editors often would suggest a symbol that doesn’t make sense from the typing perspective, as if there aren’t any language servers or intellisense or whatever).

VS code would also eat up the curly brace at the end of a class declaration when auto-generating a method skeleton.

I gave up and installed Rider. So far so good.

They say it's vscode in the article. I can't say I've seen anything that egregious happen with unity in visual studio.

It's stuff like this though that keeps me from using vscode for code editing (I use it for markdown and JSON file editing only). I guess I don't know what I'm missing but it's never been a smooth experience for me. If I'm on Windows I tend to stick with visual studio.

Maybe I should consider rider...

This is why I remapped the shortcut for AI autocomplete to Option-Tab.

Is there a GitHub issue for this?

I dunno about GitHub, but the devs are fairly responsive on the Microsoft forum (which is awful and requires MS login) and you can just Tweet-shame them into fixing stuff if you don't want to go through the proper channels ;)

Ditch VSCode, switch to Zed.

I didnt think I would ever switch from vscode but Zed is very nice and my daily driver now.

There are still plenty of things that VSCode does and Zed doesn't. E.g. Dart debugging.

Also there is the VC money problem with Zed, at some point, that money will want returns on every dollar spent.

1. Use println

2. That's fine, they'll just build some cloud feature

> 1. Use println

Printf debugging is a usability and productivity disaster compared to an actual debugger.

It depends, it can be useful to easily debug some flows. It’s also sometimes better for interactive applications where pausing the execution would break the interface.

A developer should use both.

They should, but if given the option to only exclusively use one or the other, I would never in a million years pick it. Because I have put in a tiny bit of effort into understanding how to use a debugger.

Most of them provide you with a feature list that's a strict superset of printf, because they let you set conditional non-blocking breakpoints that can have side effects. Which is perfect for the situation you've described - logging state without blocking. Then you can block and look through that state + any additional relevant info.

>1. Use println

why use so primitive methods that only work under certain circumstances

I agree that’s Zed is very nice but a ticking enshitiation time bomb. However, you do see how this autocomplete “feature” and its whole copilot everywhere strategy, is about M$’s roi of its ai investment right?

So if you have a problem with VC money you should stop using VSCode as well.

Of course they will just invent more accounting terms, like they do with azure, to hide how much money they are losing on it.

https://windowsreport.com/steve-ballmer-calls-bullshit-micro...

This is why I disable autocomplete everywhere. The only exception being shell completion on filenames and executables.

iOS autocomplete for the longest time was just absolutely insane. It would inject the selected suggested option into the middle of a word when I was correcting a spelling error. Really made me feel like I was doing something weird but I swear I was being normal for once.

Mine still does this, especially when it's correcting a word. It happens when your cursor is in the word.

But I'm not sure what I hate more: the one I hate the most is when it completes for you and then you get two instances of the word, no space separation or where it corrects the word you just swiped AND the word before it... and then when you press backspace it deletes both words...

Btw, I have autocorrect disabled...

iOS typing is a fucking nightmare

The absolute worst part of OS autocomplete in general is the myriad of apps which some-fn-how break typing wherever an autocompletion is available.

I have an autocompletion for "aa" and it's triggered before I press space, meaning it's impossible to type Aaron in these fields.

I can only imagine the pain of using "composed" input methods like CJK, etc where every glyph requires multiple keypresses: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Input_method

> iOS autocomplete for the longest time was just absolutely insane.

As well as what you describe, it starts to hate me uncertain words. I have a colleague called An. iOS hates this and changes it. It does it when you are a line away from the word too. It’s painful.

I have to type ‘TE’ regularly too, an abbreviation for echo time.

If you’re on iOS, try it. I have resorted to typing TEE and then hitting delete to remove a E and then carrying on.

Microsoft VS peaked for me in 2013 to 2017 when they decoupled a bunch of things, specifically .NET

.NET feels better than ever right now. C# native type unions maybe next year will be a big highlight.

I really hate that by default all of these tools perform completion with tab. It makes it very difficult to add indentation. It's not a problem with traditional autocomplete because you either need to already have a character typed before the cursor, or to have manually summoned the completions. But these AI autocompletes will try to generate code on completely empty lines, so you think you're pressing tab to get an indent and instead end up with code you did not want.

On a similar note, does anyone actually know how the autocomplete works in Edge? I've still not figured it out on the occasions I have the displeasure to have to use it.

Copilot M365 would rewrite part of a sentence with some random file from SharePoint right before I'd naturally hit enter and unlike any other AI chat you can't remix what you've sent you instead have to start a new chat; God forbid you're a few minutes into said chat

C# DevKit has been doing this for the last month or so I’ve noticed.

Sometimes it’s fine, sometimes it’s algebra. I know VSCode replaced their autocomplete with copilot but whaaaat?

Sometimes I don't mind being the dinosaur still on Sublime Text. It may not have kept up with the times, but at least it's not being enshittified.

These days, "not keeping up with the times" is possibly the biggest feature software can have. The current trend of shoving AI into everything is absolutely awful.

while i prefer visual studio and its working autocomplete, these recent vscode changes made me completely turn off all auto completion and insertions and no longer use any extensions, now it's barely acceptable

Not a very clear issue report, but looks like a conflict between language features, copilot, and possibly snippets?

The project is open source and invites feedback in the form of issues, although sadly their issue report page is a bit of a cesspool - will really make you lose faith in humanity.

https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues

I think maybe vibe coders got to it and don’t realize that there are certain requirements to create useful feedback? Or maybe VS Code linking from the help menu is a bad idea.

This blog post is a step above the “doesn’t work is garbage” issues filed in GitHub, but only just one. What did the author try to fix? When did it stop working? What kind of projects? What extensions are installed?

Aside: in the spirit of Christmas cheer, I’ll share this fun meme, completely (un)related to the topic at hand: https://old.reddit.com/r/github/comments/1at9br4/i_am_new_to...

> Not a very clear issue report, but looks like a conflict between language features, copilot, and possibly snippets?

Which is overwhelmingly the VS Code experience for any language. Everything feels shaky. I've had to report a bunch of irritating issues like the post for TypeScript - never fixed or resolved. I have never needed to report issues like this for C# in Visual Studio, and when I have tried C# in VS Code the experience makes me wonder if it's a bad joke.

Pretty sure you’re supposed to press return in order to accept a dropdown suggestion. Tab is for accepting the AI code completion. I disabled completions.

Pretty sure they hijacked a key most developers had a muscle memory of using since Visual Basic 6 to pump their AI usage metrics, and then invented a workaround that requires re-learning their tool.

Fair point.

True madness for average user here is that they removed Intellisense plugins and force copilot but gives a seriously unusable quota for tab-completion, for non-paid users.

I just totally don't get it.

No they didn't. They removed intellicode - an AI derivative (228 points, 10 days ago, 180 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46286383

> IntelliCode is NOT IntelliSense

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46290607

FYI: VSCode is actually a much better autocomplete experience than Visual Studio 2026. Go figure.

Jetbrains Rider is very nice. Especially with ideavim plugin.

And pretty fast these fast these days.

Another thing I'd like the team to fix, is to ignore autocomplete for ., -> and other operators in comments, or ignore all autocomplete in comments. VSCode does have the option, but at least for my C code, it only works for // comments, not /* */ ones.

> Ivan was born at a very young age, this has made a lot of people very angry and is widely regarded as a bad move.

Lol

I think it originates from The Restarurant at the end of the Universe: https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/douglas_adams_125092

This is a company that cannot get "basic file search" working on their OS for 30+ years, I'm hardly holding my breath as they double-down on overcomplexity with even more overcomplexity.

Shout-out to FileLocator Pro as an aside.

yep, and FileSearchEX

Or the start menu search

Not a fan of Windows either, but playing devil’s advocate here: Apple’s Finder has steadily gotten worse over the last ~16 years, at least in my experience. It increasingly struggles with basic functionality.

There seems to be a pattern where higher market cap correlates with worse ~~tech~~ fundamentals.

why would a company be incentivized to improve the user experience in ways that aren't profitable ? especially after watching the number one tech company literally worsen UX to increase profitability

Is this supposed to be "get your tab-to-autocomplete shit together"?

"If you have to press a key for it to happen, then it's not 'auto'."

Why do people still spend time worrying about M$ stuff…

Because it runs probably as high as 95% of enterprise environments (desktop / laptop / office / exchange / active directory)

Microsoft stuff is universally dogshit. The amount of time/money we burn on making Azure work as it’s supposed to is insane. I will never willingly give Microsoft money.

If you hate Azure, wait until you try AWS.

(I hate(d) Azure, and then I was forced to try AWS.)

Worrying? Because it's forced upon some of us.

Bigger question is how they still exist while trying as hard as they can to kill themselves. Or why they're even trying to do that in the first place

Reply on news.ycombinator.com