Microsoft Please Get Your Tab to Autocomplete Shit Together

WHY? Why? Why. I’m seriously asking. Who thought that was a good idea? Who?! FIRE THEM.

NO USER ever in the history of Windows users ever said: “I want to search the contents of my computer, but windows search is too fast; can you please make windows search extremely slow, make it omit things that I know exist, and also make it search the internet? Also, I want you to index my laptop while it is sleeping in my bag, making my bag very hot, and using up all my battery trying to cool down so that I have no battery left when I open up the laptop.”

No one has ever asked for that, but we have it, we’ve had it for a long damn time.

The fix is called Linux.

Which allows me to disable web search in start, disable widgets, etc.

https://github.com/musman96/win11debloat

Such a shame that so few applications on Win10 made use of them.

Now it's clean, doesn't show any web results when I start typing there: https://i.ibb.co/KpNptJTq/start-menu2.png

It also starts instantly every time (that requires removing Edge and web results from there). I use it as an app launcher only. The only missing touch is a fuzzy search but I can live without it.

I've spent too much time on it. There are tools that do it for you if you trust them (like Windhawk).

>>I haven't used Win11 enough to discover how they have managed to further degrade the experience, but at least it looks nicer.

It's an anti-pattern over anti-pattern over anti-pattern. There is a trap waiting for you at every corner. At this point it's hard to imagine them not losing the whole consumer PC market to Apple and maybe some gaming friendly Linux distros. It will take a decade or so but once the snowball starts it will not turn back. I don't think it's only about power users only. They forced S0 sleep but didn't are about making sure it doesn't crash the system because of some misbehaving driver or failed Windows update. Normal users don't like seeing everything gone and the computer restarting when they open the lid. That doesn't happen on Macs. It won't happen on Valve sponsored Linux distro either.

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)

It is worrying that for many months now, pretty much all the content of changelogs has been about AI.

I, and probably most uses, just hoped this going away as soon as possible again.

I think you're doing a disservice to newcomers by creating a new method of autocompletion. And I say that as somebody who has mentored a lot of newcomers in high school, University, and now professionally. Very often, including just yesterday, I'll hear something like "I don't really know how to use [very standard thing], we had [esoteric helper] instead." Yesterday it was for makefiles. Their school just abstracted it away to make it easier for them, so they don't know how to make a simple makefile to compile a few source files together. Or literally any other build system, including cmake. So, Lord have mercy on my soul if I have a new hire tell me "I don't know how to use the regular terminals. All I can use is VSCode's terminal." I think sometimes things should be hard, but I don't think terminal autocomplete is very hard. Just hit tab a few times and it'll do its thing or -h.

Where it might come in handy, and I haven't tested this, is programs that haven't registered their completions. For example, I'm often cross compiling, and it would be nice if it knew that ...-objcopy had the same completion as the host objcopy. But I am not going to take the hit of the bad pathing just for that.

I'll conclude with a lesson in biases: your insiders are biased. You need to recognize that only egregious errors might be statistically significant. Not only are they more power users, they're new feature hunters, and more than that, they want new VSCode features. Also, that's very creepy y'all are looking at my command success rate even though I'm not an insider. And if you look at the issue ticket, you'll see that a lot of the issues wouldn't cause failure. `Git add` on the wrong file isn't a negative return code, and they might just muscle memory press enter before seeing they need to edit. A possibly better metric is how many times did the user run the same command up to the completion point. But please don't collect that data, that's creepy. I'm going to have to look through my settings to try and turn that all off.

Certainly this may not even be intended gesture, but it will result in unknowable metric of users being insulted by the half-baked forced nature of these product changes.

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.

The feedback you receive is from a selection of people who’re trying new features, not people with existing patterns that is broken one of a sudden with an update while they’re trying to get stuff done.

Sure there are always the new users, who may benefit from some hand-holding. But why don't you ask first if people want their hand held? Normal terminal users are looking for a way to control their computer in a more direct fashion, which makes them faster. They seek a more predictable interface, by moving closer to the true language of the computer itself, by learning a bit about how it works inside and subsequently adapting oneself to it.

You have chosen to alienate a large group of highly knowledgeable users for a user group that may be mostly a myth.

What would make more sense is to provide a switch for "noob mode", while leaving the core experience alone. I for one already hate the difference between my normal terminal when it comes to ctrl-c/ctrl-v and pasting with select/middle-click. This current change feels like a slap in my face.

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.

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.

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

So if you have a problem with VC money you should stop using VSCode as well.

Of course they will just invent more accounting terms, like they do with azure, to hide how much money they are losing on it.

https://windowsreport.com/steve-ballmer-calls-bullshit-micro...

Microsoft should find it embarrassing how long it takes powershell to load a module. Pushing <tab> to autocomplete a cmdlet name should never take more than maybe 100 milliseconds.

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.

(I hate(d) Azure, and then I was forced to try AWS.)

I have an autocompletion for "aa" and it's triggered before I press space, meaning it's impossible to type Aaron in these fields.

I can only imagine the pain of using "composed" input methods like CJK, etc where every glyph requires multiple keypresses: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Input_method