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I'm not convinced that auto-complete will ever become more useful than the costs it imposes on the user. Even when the suggestion is correct, it still causes a
by blunte 8y ago
I'm not convinced that auto-complete will ever become more useful than the costs it imposes on the user. Even when the suggestion is correct, it still causes a mental interrupt to shift from thinking about whatever virtual problem you were solving to validating some UI behavior. To me it's just another source of distraction.
If auto-complete could reach the point where it was near perfect, then it should probably be able to write entire paragraphs or functions based on context and some minor cues. But that's not going to happen.
Where auto-complete becomes valuable is on limited keyboards, such as phones. Even there (on Android), I find it so sub-par that quite often the variant of the word I want is simply not offered to me until I have typed all but the last character. This is maddening.
- melling 8y agoI’m quite capable of dealing with the mental breaks and prefer an editor that can save me some typing. The only improvement for me would be able to say “switch statement (3 cases, no default)” swi<TAB> switch <cursor> { case <tab location>: <tab location> default: <tab location> } Actually, if I could say “switch on enum X” then have all cases generated, that would be a huge productivity gain.
- blunte 8y agoFair enough. I guess it depends a lot on the language. I use mostly Python, Elixir, and Clojure (my unnaturally desperate love, which I don't use much). For those languages, the syntax is either less verbose (python/clojure) or less predictable (elixir). If I were doing Java or C/C++, I would probably learn to love templates and expansions.
- Foivos 8y agoYou are describing code snippets. This feature is available at least in vs code [1], but I think other editors have similar features. [1] https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/editor/userdefinedsnippets https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/editor/userdefinedsnippet...