How can I turn off the intellisense-type dropdowns?

[steinhh]

I find the drop-down suggestions extremely aggressive and annoying, for example when I type

common xmuse, d,

there's almost immediately a dropdown. Most of the time, there's a better copilot ghost-text suggestion but when I try to accept that I get the top suggestion from the dropdown. Can I just stop the dropdown from appearing?

Cheers,
Stein

[znorman-harris]

Can you clarify what you mean by drop-down suggestions? Are you talking about auto-complete or quick-fix/code-actions?

[steinhh]

This:

In order to accept the ghost text, I'd have to press escape to make the drop-down go away first. I use intellisense in several other programming languages, and it's not a problem there, although I can't put my finger on why. Maybe it's slower to appear so I accept the ghosttext before the drop-down appears, or maybe it's just less aggressive? All I know is that it's enormously irritating with the IDL plugin enabled. Although far from a perfect solution, I have it disabled now, using VSCode to get the copilot suggestions, moving my mouse to an emacs window with the same file to compile & run it there with Ctrl-C Ctrl-C, a custom shortcut. Googling for how to stop intellisense suggestions (or slow them down) doesn't seem to have any effect.

(And thanks for picking it up so fast😊!)

[znorman-harris]

Thanks for the screenshot! Just wanted to make sure I was understanding your question right.

Oddly enough, I think our lead IDL developer also had this issue originally. @ct6502 do you remember what you changed your key binding to? It was a while ago, but figured I would ask if you remember.

If not, I can poke around at settings and see if there are some options.

[steinhh]

Great, thanks for looking into it! It shouldn't be hard to put in an off switch :).

W.r.t. key bindings - I hope I don't need to reprogram my fingers. At 57 I'm not as flexible as before ;-). I.e. if key bindings becomes the solution, please make it possible to move the acceptance of IDL suggestions to another key, not "move the acceptance of copilot suggestions to another key and your problem is solved" :). I program in 5 other languages as well :). Not sure about the median age of IDL programmers worldwide, but in the astronomy community I'm probably close, the youth have moved to python ;).

[chris-torrence]

You can disable this in the vs code settings. To edit the settings, hit Ctrl+Shift+P (or View->Command Palette), then type "settings", then select "Preferences: Open User Settings (JSON)". Add the following lines:

To disable completely for all languages, just add:
"editor.quickSuggestions": false,

To disable for a specific language (like IDL), just add:

"[idl]": {
  "editor.quickSuggestions": false
},

To keep it enabled but increase the delay before it appears:
"editor.quickSuggestionsDelay": 1000,

Note that even if you disable it completely, you can still press Ctrl+Space to force them to be displayed, so that's the best of both worlds...

Hope this helps!

[steinhh]

Well, that should be the answer, I know. But it doesn't work. No effect on either of my platforms:

MacOS, VSCode 1.132.0
RHEL8, VSCode 1.132.0

NOTE: It doesn't seem to work for other languages either, like Python!

The suggestions appear more or less instantaneously, despite this in my preferences (copy-pasting just to make sure I'm not making things up, this is correct, right?):

  "[idl]": {
    "editor.quickSuggestions": false,
    "editor.quickSuggestionsDelay": 2000
  }

Are you sure that did it for you guy?

However, after much googling I found something that works (so someone else apparently had the same issue, in 2022! See https://stackoverflow.com/questions/32911977/prevent-autocomplete-in-visual-studio-code/77649862#77649862:~:text=%22editor.suggest.showClasses,suggest.showUnits%22%3A%20false%2C

"[idl]: {
    "editor.suggest.showClasses": false,
    "editor.suggest.showColors": false,
    "editor.suggest.showConstants": false,
    "editor.suggest.showConstructors": false,
    "editor.suggest.showCustomcolors": false,
    "editor.suggest.showDeprecated": false,
    "editor.suggest.showEnumMembers": false,
    "editor.suggest.showEnums": false,
    "editor.suggest.showEvents": false,
    "editor.suggest.showFields": false,
    "editor.suggest.showFiles": false,
    "editor.suggest.showFolders": false,
    "editor.suggest.showFunctions": false,
    "editor.suggest.showInterfaces": false,
    "editor.suggest.showIssues": false,
    "editor.suggest.showKeywords": false,
    "editor.suggest.showMethods": false,
    "editor.suggest.showModules": false,
    "editor.suggest.showOperators": false,
    "editor.suggest.showProperties": false,
    "editor.suggest.showReferences": false,
    "editor.suggest.showSnippets": false,
    "editor.suggest.showStructs": false,
    "editor.suggest.showTypeParameters": false,
    "editor.suggest.showVariables": false,
    "editor.suggest.showValues": false,
    "editor.suggest.showWords": false,
    "editor.suggest.showUsers": false,
    "editor.suggest.showUnits": false
}

Thanks for trying! I should really report this as a VSCode bug, but... aaarghhh...

[ct6502]

Hmm, that "editor.quickSuggestions": false works for me on both Mac and Windows, v1.132.0. Maybe try getting rid of the restriction to just IDL, and put it directly into the settings.json for all languages? Also, maybe you have it defined in multiple vs code settings files (vs code is notorious for that...). If you open up the Settings dialog (Cmd+, on Mac), then type "@Modified" in the search box, it should tell you all of the settings that you've modified and where they are, hopefully! Best of luck.

[steinhh]

Strange... thanks for the @Modified tip, but it doesn't make me any wiser. Although extremely unsatisfying, I'll just go with the current solution.

Thanks again for taking my call; have a nice day! :)

[chris-torrence]

Very strange. Well, I'll close this for now since it sounds like a VS Code bug.

[chris-torrence]

I did some more digging. It looks like this combination works:

  "editor.quickSuggestions": {
    "comments": "off",
    "strings": "off",
    "other": "off"
  },
  "editor.suggestOnTriggerCharacters": false,

You could also restrict these to only "idl" if you wanted.

[steinhh]

The suggestOnTriggerCharacters : false seems to do the trick, thanks! It seems like pretty much all characters are considered triggers with this plugin 🤷. Now when I set "editor.quickSuggestionsDelay": 100 things work very well - copilot is usually faster than that, and the "editor.inlineSuggest.suppressSuggestions": true is respected.

I notice that there is also this:

"editor.inlineSuggest.experimental.showOnSuggestConflict": "always",

but I haven't experimented with it. Thanks!