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Ask HN: Programmers who don't use autocomplete/LSP, how do you do it?

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Re: Ask HN: Programmers who don't use autocomplete/LSP, how do you do it?

#311

Post by fnordsensei »

daltonpinto wrote: post #99

This question reminds me of the first time I met a blind programmer. I asked him how he managed to code, and he replied with something that stayed with me: a good programmer should organize software in such a way that every piece of code has a clear and logical place. The organization should be so intuitive that anyone could build a mental model of the structure and navigate it easily, even without seeing it. It felt…

I wonder if this makes it easier for LLMs to navigate your code as well. They are effectively blind.

Re: Ask HN: Programmers who don't use autocomplete/LSP, how do you do it?

#312

Post by exDM69 »

In Vim, the "stupid" auto complete will get 80% of the way there and works without setting up a language server and it works for any language.

By default it will give all the identifiers in all open files. Having a few of the relevant files open in the editor will get you pretty far.

I do use LSP in other environments where it is available but I still do a lot of my work with just plain vim because I jump between code bases a lot and setting up LSP for C/C++ needs some extra steps to work.

Re: Ask HN: Programmers who don't use autocomplete/LSP, how do you do it?

#313

Post by pino999 »

I did for a very long time. I only used vanilla vim, a terminal, a couple of core utils, and documentation.

You just learn to memorize a lot, organize and design your code. It feels very similar to learning to navigate a city without map. The map will be in your head. A very similar feeling I had with code bases. I navigated a map, sometimes I knew the route towards a piece of information, sometimes I knew exactly where it was. Sometimes you add a building or a new road, but you all keep it in your head.

Nowadays I use LSP, autocomplete LLM's and what not. Makes things easier and above all faster.

I still can do without, I am just a bit slower. For small changes and simple scripts I fallback to vim. For git I still use the terminal. And I still use a lot of commandline utilities, because each IDE has a zillion of commands that do the same anyway.

For your example, nowadays I would use grep or some modern equivalent to search for definitions. And to be honest, that isn't that much slower. I can have my editor open in tmux tab and in the other my editor. You don't have to jump through files then.

Re: Ask HN: Programmers who don't use autocomplete/LSP, how do you do it?

#314

Post by devjab »

zarzavat wrote: post #234
devjab wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually think the VSC terminal is one of the few saving graces it has. Maybe not so much on *nix. It works well enough on Mac, but it really shines on Windows where you’ll have a much easier time running powershell, GitShell and WSL terminals within VSC than outside of it. It also has really good integration with the various Azure CLI tools. I don’t think VSC is a very good IDE though. I have no idea why a Vim use…

> I don’t think VSC is a very good IDE though As someone who has only used inferior IDEs to VSCode ( grimaces at the thought of Xcode ) and who thinks that VSCode is very good, what exactly am I missing from better IDEs?

Vim/Emacs (and variants) are like a tailored suit. VSC is like an off-the-rack suit. It's a silly analogy but it's probably the easiest way to explain it. For me personally it's productivity, and things like LSP quality in languages which don't have very good VSC plugins. The vim plugin for VSC is pretty bad.

That being said, use what works for you.

Re: Ask HN: Programmers who don't use autocomplete/LSP, how do you do it?

#315

Post by jampekka »

iamsaitam wrote: post #299

I think purism is a slippery slope for experienced people, I too suffer from this to a certaint extent. It's natural to fight change as you get older and it's part of the struggle to change your behavior and adapt to the changing times. Short comment regarding syntax highlighting, unless you have some impairement, I think everyone benefits from this. It's something that helps you recognize patterns much faster and yo…

It's not just purism. IDEs tend to have workflow problems that distract from focusing on the code. I'm increasingly using Codium (open source VScode) but there are many papercuts that prevent vim-like workflow that integrates well with shell and the filesystem. Also vim's "dumb" autocomplete goes quite far, especially when used with the well thought out split-panel implementation.

IDEs tend implement features quite ad-hoc without thinking how they compose which limits the workflow to certain style that's not always very ideal.

Re: Ask HN: Programmers who don't use autocomplete/LSP, how do you do it?

#316

Post by roland35 »

sgarland wrote: post #295

I use nvim. If I need to look something up, I use Telescope, which pops a modal up in the current buffer. Type the first few characters of whatever you’re looking for, and get a preview of it in the codebase, as well as the path. If I want to, I can then open that file for further investigation. I personally don’t like the surprise of autocomplete, or of anything popping up on-screen that I didn’t ask for.

Telescope is amazing. Although lazyvim seems to be all in on fzf now.

Re: Ask HN: Programmers who don't use autocomplete/LSP, how do you do it?

#317

Post by maccard »

jessekv wrote: post #279
maccard wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree on turning it off to find out. I disagree with almost all of your takes though. If you work without it, I would similarly suggest turning it in for a month. > You’ll learn where all the reference docs live for your language, libraries, and frameworks, and along the way you’ll learn more by actually reading the docs. I know where they are. I use them every day. But reaching for them to check every argument if…

I upvoted both you and GP. There are times when the "programming" job is best done with vim or even just a notebook in a quiet place. Other times, an LLM or IDE can help get a new project going faster. Especially if you are unfamiliar with the language or framework. But in the latter case, do review the output until you understand it. So far even the best LLM will make subtle bugs, but unless its in a language you kn…

An LLM is like having an over eager junior dev with an eidetic memory who hasn’t slept in a week. It’s a superpower (minus the human rights issue) most of the time unless you’re not keeping an eye on it.

I’ve replaced so many tiny manual processes with python and batch scripts, and rewritten them in go when speed became an issue because of Claude and ChatGPT. I know enough to spot the glaring issue. I’m never going to sit down and write a batch file that installs my toolchain as it’s not done enough to warrant my time. But Claude will, and now our build machines use the same scripts and it means everyone is in the same environment (c++ on windows so our options are limited here)

Re: Ask HN: Programmers who don't use autocomplete/LSP, how do you do it?

#318

Post by troupo »

Matumio wrote: post #193
troupo wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I find cli tools like find/fd/grep/rg are useful because I rarely need to find only the definition of a function, but rather other call sites too, to find out how it is being used And find/grep are very bad and limited tools for this compared to what an IDE will give you

Kind of? Text search will also find commented out usage, docu, changelog, and my .org file with refactoring ideas from last month. (For better or worse.) It will also show when a class with the same method names exists elsewhere - which you want to know about if the naming is good. To find usage of a method called "update", LSP results will be better, but... that was kind of the point? That you don't name your method…

> Text search will also find commented out usage, docu, changelog, and my .org file with refactoring ideas from last month

Yes, when searching across the entire project for text an instant fuzzy search is an invaluable tool.

> It will also show when a class with the same method names exists elsewhere

Oh, this is a great example when a code-aware tool is better. I also ave a rant-ish about LSP at the end.

So, let's say you have several methods called `update` across your codebase. As per original comment, "I rarely need to find only the definition of a function, but rather other call sites too".

With text-search you will find all those other methods, and all the call sites for those methods. And not just in the working code, but across all tests as well. So you have to manually go through the search results and figure out whether a call to update is the one you're looking for.

In an IDE it's just a shortcut:

- go to definition https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/navigating-through-the-s...

- go to implementation https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/navigating-through-the-s...

- Find usages https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/find-highlight-usages.ht... perhaps even inline https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/find-highlight-usages.ht...

- find the full caller hierarchy https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/viewing-structure-and-hi...

And so on.

Oh, you want to know where all the methods called `updated` are defined to go and scream at someone?

- Search for symbols https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/searching-everywhere.htm...

Of course all that is also integrated with things like refactoring. So if you rename a method, you don't have to painstakingly manually search for all invocations of that method. Or if you rename a parameter to that method, or... See the several dozen possibilities here: https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/refactoring-source-code....

----

Here comes the rant.

The whole "text searching is enough, the compiler will pint to me the errors I've made" fashion has held back tool development by several decades. It's telling that LSP (which has barely 5-10% of IDEA's functionality) has taken this world by storm. Suddenly the languages and the editors that lacked even the basic quality of life improvements when working with code got a glimpse of what is possible.

Welcome to the very early beginning of the 21st century. Perhaps in 20 more years you will finally let go of the notion that painstakingly doing a computer's job is not in any way or form productive or indicative of a great programmer somehow [1]. And that to work with code you really want tools that are capable of working with code.

After all, somehow, you reach for Excel/Numbers/Google Sheets to work with spreadsheets, for Photoshop/numerous alternatives to edit photos etc. You don't reach for some generic vaguely-adjacent tool to do the job.

[1] I keep telling this story: About 5 years back I saw several people switch from vi/emacs to PHPStorm/IDEA after watching me zipping through code (including jumping from Symfony configs to code and back) while they spent often minutes doing fuzzy searching through the codebase we were working at the time: a huge legacy monolith we were slowly refactoring and splitting up.

Re: Ask HN: Programmers who don't use autocomplete/LSP, how do you do it?

#319

Post by worksonmine »

jessekv wrote: post #269
jazzyjackson wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uhhh that would involve a mouse, gross ; )

Do you use a keyboard to browse the internet? On unfamiliar codebases a mouse with back and forward buttons can be quite a fast and convenient way to get the "lie of the land". I often do this inside GitHub's browser-based editor.

> Do you use a keyboard to browse the internet?

Yes, using the vimium extension. My only problem is text inputs like this one, my muscle memory expects vim keys to work and I type a lot of jibberish that I have to clean up. I know there are extensions for that too but I can live with it.

Re: Ask HN: Programmers who don't use autocomplete/LSP, how do you do it?

#320

Post by diegof79 »

In my experience, code navigation features are necessary for writing code comfortably. If you mean only auto-complete by LSP, then yes, it saves you some typing or function lookup, but that’s not the main benefit for me.

Years ago, I worked for a long time using Smalltalk (VisualAge Smalltalk, to be more specific). Older Smalltalk versions didn’t have autocomplete. But it wasn’t a problem because Smalltalk has excellent code navigation features: find implementations of a message, find callers, and evaluate code inline. With those features and some code conventions, I never felt the need for autocomplete.

Perhaps it’s my Smalltalk legacy, but nowadays, I use the most Cmd/Ctrl-Click to navigate to the implementation, read the sources, and use the “find references” feature. I don’t know if the LSP implements those features, but reading the sources gives me much more information.

Before programming in Smalltalk, I did some C++ and Java programming. While all Java IDEs had autocomplete, C++ autocomplete was unreliable on most tools I used. The solution is to read the docs and the source using search tools across the code base and third-party sources.

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