Microsoft please get your tab to autocomplete shit together

(ivanca.github.io)

112 points | by AmbroseBierce 3 hours ago

22 comments

  • meander_water 2 hours ago
    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.
    • causal 2 hours ago
      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.
    • kace91 1 hour ago
      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?

      • hoten 1 hour ago
        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.
      • reactordev 38 minutes ago
        Copilot
    • tsujamin 2 hours ago
      I thought I was going crazy, but it started feeling materially worse sometime in last few weeks.
      • matltc 22 minutes ago
        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)

    • smj-edison 1 hour ago
      Ohh, that's what has been happening when I've had tab completion fail recently! Thanks for mentioning it...
  • yoyohello13 2 hours ago
    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.
    • Yossarrian22 1 hour ago
      Nobody is dogfooding the non-AI versions of autocomplete anymore is my best guess
  • diath 2 hours ago
    It's because Tab accepts copilot suggestion, you have to press Enter instead to accept the language server suggestion.
    • Someone1234 2 hours ago
      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.

      • stevage 1 hour ago
        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.

      • mcv 2 hours ago
        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.

      • n8cpdx 9 minutes ago
        Do people know you can turn copilot off?
  • locusofself 1 hour ago
    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.

    • cowlby 33 minutes ago
      Powershell right arrow is madness… just found out F2 shows all the options though and finally it’s a little more tolerable
    • jknutson 1 hour ago
      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.
      • naikrovek 1 minute ago
        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.

    • RajT88 1 hour ago
      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)

  • ziml77 3 minutes ago
    [delayed]
  • OptionOfT 2 hours ago
    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.

    • Someone1234 2 hours ago
      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).

      • OptionOfT 1 hour ago
        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.

      • WackyFighter 48 minutes ago
        I use this script here and it will remove the stupid bing search feature.

        https://github.com/musman96/win11debloat

    • anonymars 1 hour ago
      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. 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.

    • FridayoLeary 2 hours ago
      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.

      • esseph 1 hour ago
        Do you remember the windows 8 full screen start menu?
        • 8note 10 minutes ago
          i miss the wondows 8 inking tools. loved that for drawing system diagrams and flow charts:'(
  • itissid 2 hours ago
    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.

  • shinymark 11 minutes ago
    Change to real Visual Studio for C#. Visual Studio Code is complete garbage in comparison.
  • jimbo808 2 hours ago
    I wonder if 30% of their code being written by AI has anything to do with it
    • stefan_ 2 hours ago
      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
  • reactordev 39 minutes ago
    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?

  • freetonik 3 hours ago
    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.

    • PacificSpecific 2 hours ago
      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...

  • mfro 2 hours ago
    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.
    • Someone1234 2 hours ago
      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.
      • mfro 1 hour ago
        Fair point.
  • koakuma-chan 2 hours ago
    Ditch VSCode, switch to Zed.
    • citbl 1 hour ago
      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.

      • koakuma-chan 33 minutes ago
        1. Use println

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

    • shadester88 1 hour ago
      I didnt think I would ever switch from vscode but Zed is very nice and my daily driver now.
  • thecrumb 1 hour ago
    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.
  • n8cpdx 2 hours ago
    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...

    • lloydatkinson 2 hours ago
      > 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.

  • PieUser 1 hour ago
    Is there a GitHub issue for this?
  • piskov 2 hours ago
    Jetbrains Rider is very nice. Especially with ideavim plugin.

    And pretty fast these fast these days.

  • tiotempestade 1 hour ago
    Why do people still spend time worrying about M$ stuff…
    • esseph 1 hour ago
      Because it runs probably as high as 95% of enterprise environments (desktop / laptop / office / exchange / active directory)
  • giancarlostoro 3 hours ago
    Microsoft VS peaked for me in 2013 to 2017 when they decoupled a bunch of things, specifically .NET
    • CharlieDigital 2 hours ago
      .NET feels better than ever right now. C# native type unions maybe next year will be a big highlight.
  • jspann 1 hour ago
    > 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

  • luxuryballs 1 hour ago
    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.
  • Someone1234 2 hours ago
    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.

    • ashvardanian 1 hour ago
      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.

      • Aeglaecia 1 hour ago
        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
    • croes 1 hour ago
      Or the start menu search
    • pcunite 2 hours ago
      yep, and FileSearchEX