Microsoft please get your tab to autocomplete shit together • Hacker News Board

Re: Microsoft please get your tab to autocomplete shit together

#151

Post by GNyZhf6g » Mon, Dec 29, 2025, 6:42 PM UTC

Tyriar wrote: post #117

meander_water wrote: post #8

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.

Hi from the VS Code team - I recently went into detail about why we did this in https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/282268#issuecomme... . We believe it'll be beneficial overall and go a long way in lowering the bar to make the terminal less intimidating for newcomers. Conflicts with muscle memory was always a big concern which is why we made extra effort to be able to turn it off, the comment below that one o…

I appreciate the effort you put into developing this. However, I'm honestly shocked you received only positive reactions. I booted up my system today and found that it made terminal nearly unusable. The old tab-complete behavior gets you to the branch point you want fast, minimizing typing time. The new behavior quickly shoots past the relevant branch point, meaning I spend considerable effort going back to edit commands.

Also, speaking as an educator, I think there might be a misunderstanding about what makes things intimidating for new users. Systems that make specific decisions without being able to easily control them makes things more intimidating, not less. And if I'm reading your post correctly, it sounds like you are trying to introduce a feature on newcomers, but your internal testing was done on insiders and stable users -- a different population.

Frankly, at this point I may strongly discourage all of my students from using VSCode.

Re: Microsoft please get your tab to autocomplete shit together

#152

Post by naikrovek » Sun, Jan 04, 2026, 3:41 PM UTC

array_key_first wrote: post #132

naikrovek wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When Windows Phone was a thing, those live tiles were amazing. Those giant squares in the Win10 start menu were live tiles. Such a shame that so few applications on Win10 made use of them.

They never made sense for desktop interfaces with a keyboard and mouse. Information density is usually preferred, because we have big screens and precise, fast input.

I don’t know how you think live tiles worked but they showed you information from an application without launching the application. You just open the start menu and you’d see all the current info from those applications at a glance, whether they were running or not, no clicking required.

Re: Microsoft please get your tab to autocomplete shit together

#153

Post by array_key_first » Tue, Jan 06, 2026, 12:32 AM UTC

naikrovek wrote: post #152

array_key_first wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They never made sense for desktop interfaces with a keyboard and mouse. Information density is usually preferred, because we have big screens and precise, fast input.

I don’t know how you think live tiles worked but they showed you information from an application without launching the application. You just open the start menu and you’d see all the current info from those applications at a glance, whether they were running or not, no clicking required.

They took up 10x more space than they need to. And we had the information thing way, way before.

I can see the weather on my taskbar right now in KDE, no app launch required. Except it's not a giant 1 inch by 1 inch square plastered on my start menu. It's a little text showing me a cloud and temperature.

Also, live tiles just did not work a lot of the time. Most of the time, when you looked at them, it would just show the icon surrounded by a sea of color, like a little island. I'm assuming because the daemon is either not running or has ridiculously slow start up time, whereas the start menu might only be open for fractions of a second.