Otte: staring into the abyss [LWN.net]

Otte: staring into the abyss

Posted Jul 29, 2012 12:49 UTC (Sun) by Wol (guest, #4433)
In reply to: Otte: staring into the abyss by rschroev
Parent article: Otte: staring into the abyss

Yup.

Something else I thought of, too - which is faster, to context-switch and take advantage of the computer's help, or to just carry on typing? If you're a fast typist, the computer "being helpful" is just getting in the way.

I play classical guitar, so I actually class myself as a 6-fingered typist, and typing this comment here it's actually quite obvious. I'm using my left hand "correctly" as a touch-typist and it's making almost no mistakes. My right hand is doing a two-fingered "hunt-n-peck", and making a lot of mistakes. So even if I don't have something to copy, autocomplete can be a real nuisance for me.

So yeah, for many of us auto-complete probably is helpful. But for someone who knows how to type, it's almost certainly faster and easier to turn it off (that is, you can find out how!) and do everything long hand - you'll do it faster than you can context switch.

Cheers,
Wol

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Otte: staring into the abyss

Posted Jul 29, 2012 13:12 UTC (Sun) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

If you're a fast typist, the computer "being helpful" is just getting in the way.

That's why IntelliSense-class 'helpful' things should obey two rules: operate on a customizable delay, and don't pop up things that change the semantics of input unless explicitly requested.

In the Emacs world, CEDET with auto-complete.el does this, displaying potential tab-completions in faint text beside the cursor after a short delay (when you've obviously stopped typing in the middle of an identifier because you can't remember what it is), and only on hitting, say, the tab key do you get an actual popup menu to select potential matches from.

I've seen IntelliSense systems that lack one or the other of these properties and they are both intolerable to use, either spamming you with stuff you already know, or popping up things and blocking user input when you don't want that.