Comment by zahlman
1 year ago
>If you work without it, I would similarly suggest turning it in for a month.
In the past when I've tried to use IDEs, I've often given up within minutes because they would keep doing things that disrupt my flow - like popping up an entire menu of autocomplete suggestions in a way that obscures other code I'm trying to read, or autotyping a close bracket that I would have typed anyway by muscle memory, or not making it clear how to move the cursor past something it auto-typed, or interrupting me with warnings that something won't compile when I haven't finished typing it....
This is also exactly my take. I've been coding over 40 years, long before autocomplete was really a thing, and that's probably the main reason I find autocomplete and all the stuff that pops up in modern IDEs to be annoying for all the reasons you described.
Autocomplete and all the other bells-and-whistles just get in my way, most of the time. It's literally the first thing I disable for myself when I install a new developer machine. The few times I set up a new machine and don't disable it, I am reminded why I want to disable it very quickly.
Autoclosing parens, brackets, braces -- one of the most annoying things to me, for example in tools like JupyterLab, but also in IDEs.
My editor inserts them and “smartly” overwrites them. If you type it yourself it will ignore it and move the cursor. You can hit delete and it will remove the added parenthesis, or you can keep typing and it will leave it there for you.
It’s been configurable as an option to have those in every editor I’ve used for about 15 years
Yeah that's something I disable in every tool I touch. Especially when I'm typing something like foo(), by the time any autocomplete inserts that closing parenthesis, I will have already typed it, and now I'm distracted.
I don't mind suggestions if they are unobtrusive, but anything that interrupts my typing is an immediate no-no.
> In the past when I've tried to use IDEs, I've often given up within minutes because they would keep doing things that disrupt my flow
All the things that can be turned off/tuned. Strange that you don't spend the time learning the tool you admonish others for using
I don't in any way "admonish others for using" IDEs and I have no idea where that accusation came from.
And no, of course I'm not going to spend time learning an IDE that someone else recommended to me. I spend my tool-learning time on tools that I selected because I expected them a priori to be useful for me.
Arguably, they did turn it off: the whole IDE, at once.
Okay, now stick with it for a month.
I’ve been coding for 2 decades. Autotyping anything is something I always find incredibly disruptive, regardless of how long I spend with tools that do this.