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0 pointsdullgiulio7y ago0 comments

Gmail smart completion is more akin to a template, like giving you an empty class or an empty main function. Its utility (at least in my experience) hasn't gone much farther.

The example you link (from Zsh, not fish) is a fancy looking history autocompletion: in bash, just press Ctrl+r.

The parent has a point: I've spent time working with absolute beginners in programming and the first thing I was teaching them was to ignore the IDE "smarter autocompletion" and suggestions. For typing faster, sure; for suggesting anything else, not so clever.

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ehsankia7y ago

Just a correction, my example was from a zsh plugin which imitates a built-in fish feature. Also, said feature is different from ctrl+r, which all 3 shells still have.

This one suggests possible completions as you type, so it's a passive feature, compared to ctrl+r which is more active and requires explicit action to work.

And yes, I agree that the whole purpose is to write faster, not to write smarter. I'd maybe add cleaner too, because unless you auto format your code, people often don't write the best by default.

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