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Ask HN: How many of you actually use and rely on intellisense/autocomplete?
I used to think that autocompletion facilities like Intellisense and its variations were a key component to productivity when writing code. But I only thought this because I've typically used IDEs that provided that. I recently moved to emacs because it offers so many other conveniences, but the one item I found hard to get going reliably and usefully was autocomplete for my particular situation (which is not relevant).
But, I discovered how much I actually didn't need this kind of tool. I'm curious what others' opinions and experiences are?
In emacs if I really want to save typing, I go much further than any normal IDE and use yasnippet to customize much larger chunks of code for me, so I can still lean on that. But using intellisense as an "inline function lookup" doesn't appear as useful as I at first thought.
- beeswax 10y agoFor me it helps getting a feel for new languages / environments so I can get up to speed and tinker without losing too much momentum. Also camelCaseMethod completion (e.g. via ccm) can speed up progress dramatically if you know the exact method you want to call. It's all nice as long as those features don't get in to my way (slow autocomplete, method and block templates that are harder to navigate than writing without help, massive method lists like Xcode shows for every possible message you might want send to that object etc). I always liked the IntelliJ IDEA autocomplete for Java code as well as e.g. Spring/Hibernate Annotations; it was way more responsive than Eclipse and indeed a productivity feature saving time, alongside its impressive refactoring tools.