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.
Yeah for anyone else (especially Mac and Linux users) who recently had this frustration thrust upon you: Go into VSCode settings and search for terminal integration > uncheck.
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 outlines some steps we're making to make it more easily configurable inline.
On the roll out side, this is what we observed:
- It was enabled in Insiders for several months, generally only very positive reactions
- It was surprising to me that we shipped this to 25% of our stable users and basically no one complained for 2 weeks before we rolled out to 100%
- After hitting 100% of users we did see some backlash like this comment
- Of course telemetry doesn't show the whole story, but we try to determine both whether the completion was modified and whether the command was successful after using it and both numbers stayed relatively stable since shipping in Insiders at what we consider pretty good numbers (both accept without editing and command success rate is ~80%).
I've had to take a beat to find the right words as all the frustration in the issue ticket impacted me too which has left a very bad taste in my mouth after being initially curious and open to the new feature.
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.
Nobody at Microsoft has ever used this with WSL, and doing a "cd /", and getting autocomplete for "$RecycleBin" and other windows paths? It completely breaks bash autocomplete, and every single suggestion is completely wrong, in every single command i type.
I, and probably most uses, just hoped this going away as soon as possible again.
The insane behavior in the post is not that you get fancy completions, but that the completion does not match the preview. If the computer starts doing A when you asked it B, it is equivalent to a trash can.
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.
This a byproduct of metric-driven development. The result is a creepy manifestation of force-fed features backed by "telemetry" (action and result logging, and sometimes keystroke or string logging), but I don't place any blame on this developer; this is the way it has been at that company for a while and that horse has long since left the barn.
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.
First of all, I appreciate and respect you coming here and defending your choices. That said:
I think that bar-lowering is not really something that Terminal users want, if they wanted simplicity they wouldn't be in a terminal in the first place, at least that holds true for a large portion of the Terminal users.
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.
I've seen some weird breakage recently in vscode. The C++ support failing to parse sources correctly (for LLVM), Rust debugging no longer showing vectors properly. Not sure if this is some bizarre interaction with my setup (which is pretty vanilla Ubuntu) or a regression in basic functionality brought on by an over-emphasis on AI features.
It is worrying that for many months now, pretty much all the content of changelogs has been about AI.
Recent changes have been a little invasive. The terminal auto complete was a week or so ago, and the popular Gitlens extension also recently pushed a really poor rebase interface. Besides those two in the last weeks, I can't remember any time VS Code has messed up my workflows so badly.
It does weird stuff. I've bitched about it do much to my workmates until they disabled autoformat features wich cause 5k line conflicts in SCM. I'm ysing codium which also does Clippy dmart stuff trying to be helpful and breaks code. They keep pushing AI junk and break functionality to the point that I'm looking for another editor with usable muliple cursors (not *vim and not helix which breaks my vim muscle memory).
I don’t know if this is related, but for me the terminal is broken and causes VS Code to crash. It only happens after a command finishes executing and before the shell prompts again
Nope, not crazy. Pretty much solely used it for years but got a lazyvim* setup last week
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)
after two decades my muscle memory in the terminal is pretty important. that + with keyboard shortcuts ive had multiple jobs ask me to "slow down" when doing screenshares as everything moves so fast.
Ha, was going to come here to complain! It completely breaks my up arrow is history search based on typed chars. First thing I do on a Linux box (and it will blow your mind) is put this in ~/.inputrc :
If you think that you can just start "enhancing" people's terminal experience like it's a Windows 11 taskbar, I don't think you understand terminal users. It's all good, but make it opt in via some config file (i.e. ~/.bashrc)!
For one, it's the right arrow key for complete for most things (but tab for others).
But by FAR the worst thing is that often times you'll type a command and try to tab/arrow complete an argument, and the module/dll or whatever is not loaded into memory, and so theres some blocking operation and loads the module which takes 10+ seconds. This happens to me almost every day.
I do love powershell otherwise though, after 20+ years in bash, there is actually some things to like about it.
If you like Powershell but have some complaints, you might find nushell to be the best of both worlds. My elevator pitch for it would be imagine the object-oriented / typed nature of Powershell, minus the verbosity and windows-centric design of it. As someone who develops on and for windows computers, nushell is a real breath of fresh air.
I have a command line program at work which outputs json. Pure JSON in all situations.
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.
I like PowerShell too, but in what universe other than ours (clearly the worst one) is it even possible for loading a module to take more time than the blink of an eye?
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 don’t know what it is but I think commpletion across editors has gotten so much worse. Even PyCharm now routinely completes some hallucinated method or library. Even with AI completions off I feel like it still somehow got dumber since 2023.
Intellisense + Intellicode + Roslynator (extension) combined were really the height of productivity in Visual Studio. Now they've driven a steam-roller over all of that, forced CoPilot down our throats.
I LIKE CoPilot's "chat" interface, and agents are fine too (although Claude in VS Code is tons better), but CoPilot auto-complete is negative value and shouldn't be used.
Huh I'm the opposite. I find the copilot chat slow and low value compared to ChatGPT. But I use the tab autocomplete a lot.
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.
I hate the time unpredictability of it. Intellij also has AI completion suggestions, and sometimes they're really useful. But sometimes when I expect them, they don't come. Or they briefly flash and then disappear.
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.
Windows Search requires a DNS lookup, and HTTP request to start your search, as a direct result if either one of those is slow the whole UI lags and hangs. It hasn't ever been fixed in Windows 11.
Also, there is a RegX way of disabling "bing" for-real in the search but they released an update that caused doing so to break search entirely if that was set (totally a coincidence I'm sure).
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.
I have resorted to installing my laptop with Ireland / English & later switching the region to US / English. That way it's considered part of the European Economic Area.
Which allows me to disable web search in start, disable widgets, etc.
> Windows Search requires a DNS lookup, and HTTP request to start your search, as a direct result if either one of those is slow the whole UI lags and hangs. It hasn't ever been fixed in Windows 11.
I was surprised when I saw that in Windows 11 Safe Mode, the Start Menu appeared to have two forms: the first of which would not appear to show typing, but then it would be replaced with the other layout after a lag with the query in the input box and the results populated.
I'm convinced that the win10 Start Menu was the single worst thing microsoft inflicted upon us in that OS. I imagine that particular discussion went like this:
Exec1:"We have a semi decent os with a refreshingly updated UI that should stay relevant for a decade. How can we make it better?"
Exec2: "why not replace the perfectly good start menu we have with an ugly, oddly proportioned rectangle with animated ads for our products."
Exec3: "Sounds
great! Just make sure
it has a quarter of the information density of the old one and takes up twice the screen space."
I haven't used Win11 enough to discover how they have managed to further degrade the experience, but at least it looks nicer.
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.
Windows Vista/7, search was instant and correct (modulo hard drive speed and RAM). Then Windows 10 came along, I click a local result, half the time it takes forever to open Explorer, or nothing happens, or there's no results once it does open.
By the way, things still work correctly and instantly with OpenShell, so something still works underneath whatever shit veneer has coated the shell
Let me fix the title: Microsoft, please get your shit together
I tried to help a relative set up a new Windows PC recently and had to give up. Everything was confusing and/or broken, and for the first time I am ready to just send them to Apple while they can still return it. A literal brand new PC with nothing installed, and after logging in, clicking Explorer in the task bar doesn't work and I have to reboot and try again? I'm not even angry, just disappointed.
Did you know there's no more Office, they literally call it Microsoft Copilot 365 now? Like, I've been through shades of this before (".NET", anyone?) but it's a thoroughly unhinged clusterfuck on an entirely different level now.
Oh, I'd say AI is rotting our brains, all right...
There was a time when if you edited documentation in vscode and had copilot on it would complete internal user and project names when it encountered a path on some.random LLM project we were building. I could find people and their projects by just googling the username and contextual keywords.
We all had a lot of laughs with tab auto complete and wondered in anticipation what ridiculous stuff it threw up next.
30% of code written by AI, but 100% of tools must be enshittified with the terrible and behind Microsoft Copilot even if it means you will blow up the goodwill for VS Code in a matter of months
Readit News
On the roll out side, this is what we observed:
- It was enabled in Insiders for several months, generally only very positive reactions - It was surprising to me that we shipped this to 25% of our stable users and basically no one complained for 2 weeks before we rolled out to 100% - After hitting 100% of users we did see some backlash like this comment - Of course telemetry doesn't show the whole story, but we try to determine both whether the completion was modified and whether the command was successful after using it and both numbers stayed relatively stable since shipping in Insiders at what we consider pretty good numbers (both accept without editing and command success rate is ~80%).
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.
I, and probably most uses, just hoped this going away as soon as possible again.
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.
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.
I think that bar-lowering is not really something that Terminal users want, if they wanted simplicity they wouldn't be in a terminal in the first place, at least that holds true for a large portion of the Terminal users.
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.
Has there been a change lately and in the project, or is it just internet bias?
It is worrying that for many months now, pretty much all the content of changelogs has been about AI.
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)
For one, it's the right arrow key for complete for most things (but tab for others).
But by FAR the worst thing is that often times you'll type a command and try to tab/arrow complete an argument, and the module/dll or whatever is not loaded into memory, and so theres some blocking operation and loads the module which takes 10+ seconds. This happens to me almost every day.
I do love powershell otherwise though, after 20+ years in bash, there is actually some things to like about it.
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.
https://github.com/nushell/nushell/issues/13601
https://github.com/nushell/nushell/issues/16379
It is amazing until you run into one of these insane behaviors that somehow nobody ever fixed.
(Some are actually fixed finally in 7.x - like issues with filenames with grave characters in them)
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.
Set-PSReadLineKeyHandler -Chord "Tab" -Function AcceptSuggestion
Intellisense + Intellicode + Roslynator (extension) combined were really the height of productivity in Visual Studio. Now they've driven a steam-roller over all of that, forced CoPilot down our throats.
I LIKE CoPilot's "chat" interface, and agents are fine too (although Claude in VS Code is tons better), but CoPilot auto-complete is negative value and shouldn't be used.
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.
Why can't all the suggestions come through the same UI element? That's beyond my understanding.
You'd get suggestions from,
- multiple language servers
- matches from the same buffer/project or sibling pane (tab,window, whatever you call it)
- matches from the dictionary
It's been botched since they added ads to the Start Menu.
Pretty soon VSCode will show you intellisense ads in the list of code completions.
Also, there is a RegX way of disabling "bing" for-real in the search but they released an update that caused doing so to break search entirely if that was set (totally a coincidence I'm sure).
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.
Which allows me to disable web search in start, disable widgets, etc.
The fix is called Linux.
https://github.com/musman96/win11debloat
Exec1:"We have a semi decent os with a refreshingly updated UI that should stay relevant for a decade. How can we make it better?"
Exec2: "why not replace the perfectly good start menu we have with an ugly, oddly proportioned rectangle with animated ads for our products."
Exec3: "Sounds great! Just make sure it has a quarter of the information density of the old one and takes up twice the screen space."
I haven't used Win11 enough to discover how they have managed to further degrade the experience, but at least it looks nicer.
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.
Such a shame that so few applications on Win10 made use of them.
Windows Vista/7, search was instant and correct (modulo hard drive speed and RAM). Then Windows 10 came along, I click a local result, half the time it takes forever to open Explorer, or nothing happens, or there's no results once it does open.
By the way, things still work correctly and instantly with OpenShell, so something still works underneath whatever shit veneer has coated the shell
Let me fix the title: Microsoft, please get your shit together
I tried to help a relative set up a new Windows PC recently and had to give up. Everything was confusing and/or broken, and for the first time I am ready to just send them to Apple while they can still return it. A literal brand new PC with nothing installed, and after logging in, clicking Explorer in the task bar doesn't work and I have to reboot and try again? I'm not even angry, just disappointed.
Did you know there's no more Office, they literally call it Microsoft Copilot 365 now? Like, I've been through shades of this before (".NET", anyone?) but it's a thoroughly unhinged clusterfuck on an entirely different level now.
Oh, I'd say AI is rotting our brains, all right...
Sounds like botched since they botched it
We all had a lot of laughs with tab auto complete and wondered in anticipation what ridiculous stuff it threw up next.
breakpoint( and then some nonsense arguments.
Apparently a good chunk of the code that these LLMs are trained on is python, yet setting a debugging breakpoint still causes difficulties.