We just launched an option to enable always-on autocompletion. As opposed to the current autocompletion system which only shows completions when you hit Tab, this new mode shows completions as you type. They’re the same completions, and the same mechanics work.
This is a new setting you can choose in your user preferences:
We’re putting this out in the world to gather feedback, and then our intent is to enable it by default for new signups. The current completion system, while useful, often goes unused by people who expect always-on completion – because always-on is the default setting for Atom, VS Code, Sublime Text, and many other popular editors. By enabling the setting by default, we’ll make it useful to those new users, and by adding an option to turn it off, it will also work for folks who use manually-triggered completion.
Our code completion is based on a combination of live values, cell names, values from the standard library, and tokens. In the near future, we’re going to bring it a few steps further, potentially working from the LSP ecosystem to show completions based on advanced static analysis.
I’m sorry but I hate this feature. It’s slowed me down significantly ever since it was enabled, and I finally got to the point of actively trying to turn it off, but it doesn’t seem like I can.
That is surprising! Would love to hear more about this.
Are you referring to code auto-completion in JavaScript cells? Would you mind sharing a bit more about how it is slowing you down? I find that I can just keep on typing and ignore the auto-completions when I don’t want them.
I think it is often the code auto-completion in JavaScript cells (which incidentally, the change to how cells are created I also find gets in the way). I find that the feature often suggests words or phrases that are not relevant to what I am trying to type, and it adds extra steps to the process of entering text. This can be frustrating and time-consuming, and it has made me less efficient when using the product. And I would love to simply ignore it, but it seems to insert things anyway and I find I am constantly tripping over it, trying to undo what it does, or figure out how to avoid it.
