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I have a positive message. I'm happy to see that t...
# intellij
l
I have a positive message. I'm happy to see that type-aware completion (i.e. the feature that is bound to control-shift-space by default) has finally been implemented in the latest EAP. Now, I have a question for everybody: During the time when it wasn't available, I was quite frustrated and stayed on K1 for quite a while because of it. When talking to JB about it, I learned that they implemented features based on their statistics, and implemented features that was used a lot first. That makes sense, but it seems weird to me that type-aware-completion was only used by a single-digit-percent of users. If people are not using it, then what do they use?
đź‘€ 1
b
Ctrl Space
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l
Yeah, I mean, that's what I had to resort to while this wasn't implemented. But even when it works (when using K1) according to their statistics, I was told it's not used nearly as much as I'd expect. Do people just not know about it?
w
Do people just not know about it?
That'd be my guess. I don't have a very large sample size but from what I observed during recruitment (live coding interviews) most people barely use IDE shortcuts, I wouldn't be surprised at all that the smart completion is not widely known. I think it also used to be pretty slow at some point, so maybe people unlearned it?
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l
You are right about the slowness, but that happend during the last complete rewrite of the completion system, which happened back when they went from version 3.x to 4.x. This was long enough ago that some of the people you were interviewing were probably in daycare when it happened.
It took a few releases to fix it, but it's been at least 15 years of acceptable performance.
w
I vaguely recall performance issues editing Kotlin when it went out. IJ performance was initially great for Kotlin, and then tanked for a while, including smart completion. That'd still be some 7 years ago though
l
Oh, the Kotlin performance in general. You may be right about that. That was a period where I didn't use IJ much at all, but I remember issues back then (there was a small Android application I was working on in Kotlin, way before Kotlin was officially adopted for Android). So this must have been around then.
And oh yes, I think completion was kinda broken as well at the time.
If a lot of users cut their teeth on those versions, that would explain a lot.
c
I'm happy to see that type-aware completion has finally been implemented in the latest EAP
In which build? In Build #IU-252.23309.22, built on June 19, 2025, I don't have it, and the toolbox doesn't suggest any newer version.
Personally, I've switched the keybinds many years ago (CTRL SPACE is type-matching, CTRL SHIFT SPACE is regular) so it is very frustrating not having it in Kotlin. I don't really understand how people work with type-matching completion…
l
@CLOVIS it's in 
Build #IU-252.23309.22
. I have it from toolbox. That said, I was made aware of its existence from someone at JB, because I had filed some bug about it. I told them I couldn't find it in toolbox, and a day or so later got a message saying it should be available. I checked, and indeed it was. If it's not available for you, maybe they gave only me a slightly higher version for testing?
In any case, it's a good first step, but it still has a lot of limitations, so I wouldn't call it ready anyway. Basic type-aware completions work now though, and that's infinitely better than what we had, which was nothing.
c
@loke you sent the same build umber as I did, but I don't have it 🤔
l
@CLOVIS Indeed. It was because I was sending it from the version on my laptop, which I realise now has not been updated.
I'm not entirely sure how they managed to give the update only on one of my workstations. They are all logged in as the same user.
In any case, that's why you don't have the update.
I just came home and check my home environment. It reports the same version as my laptop, but it doesn't work there.
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