[MonoDevelop] Code Completion

[Bart Masschelein]

On 10 Nov 2008, at 00:35, Federico Di Gregorio wrote:

> Il giorno dom, 09/11/2008 alle 18.26 -0500, Michael Hutchinson ha  
> scritto:
>> On Sun, Nov 9, 2008 at 5:50 PM, Federico Di Gregorio  
>> <fog at initd.org> wrote:
>>> Il giorno dom, 09/11/2008 alle 17.11 -0500, Michael Hutchinson ha  
>>> scritto:
>>>>> New to Linux and Mono, 3rd day and still finding my feet. I have  
>>>>> come from a
>>>>> MS dev background using C# in Visual Studio and got used to the  
>>>>> code
>>>>> completion present in that IDE.
>>>>>
>>>>> Is there a way to make code completion work as per VS in that it  
>>>>> is always
>>>>> active as you type instead of the need for ctrl+space to trigger?
>>>>
>>>> This has been implemented in trunk and will be present in the  
>>>> upcoming
>>>> 2.0 Alpha 2 release.
>>>
>>> And it will be possible to disable it? I find it very annoying. :/
>>
>> If you disable code completion in MD settings, I believe Ctrl-Space
>> still works. I'm not sure if we should enable any granularity beyond
>> this.
>
> Mm.. I find code completation after a . or ( to be extremely useful  
> but
> just having it complete every time a type a letter is annoying because
> disables the cursor keys, so I cant just type a letter and move around
> but every time I need to type, _escape _ and then move.
>
> Having completation enabled for ., ( and other special chars and C- 
> space
> to everything else it is better in my case. Or just tell my how do VS
> people work without having to type ESC every few letters. :)

I, for one, love code completion, and could not do without. So when I  
saw the extensive code completion, as seen in VS, as well in the  
latest MonoDevelop, my heart made a little jump ;-). Once you get used  
to using it, it is a second keyboard. You just type the few letters  
you need to distinguish what you want, press tab, and hup, you have it  
there for you. It heavily reduces the amount of typing, and encourages  
long, self-explanatory variable names. As for the escape issue, iirc,  
VS does not do any code completion when it assumes you declare a  
variable name. Obviously. I'm not on a windows machine, so I cannot  
verify, but MonoDevelop 2.0 alpha 2 on OSX has this behaviour, which  
is nice. And when you get used to it, the tab and escape button are so  
close that moving you're left hand in the upper left corner of you key  
board becomes an automatism.

De gustibus etc...

Bart