This is a company that cannot get "basic file search" working on their OS for 30+ years, I'm hardly holding my breath as they double-down on overcomplexity with even more overcomplexity.
Not a fan of Windows either, but playing devil’s advocate here: Apple’s Finder has steadily gotten worse over the last ~16 years, at least in my experience. It increasingly struggles with basic functionality.
There seems to be a pattern where higher market cap correlates with worse ~~tech~~ fundamentals.
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.
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.
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.
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 and update that caused doing so to break search entirely if that was set (totally a coincidence I'm sure).
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.
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.
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
Looks like Unity code. Not sure if it’s Visual Studio or VS Code, but yeah, it was baffling to me how weirdly bad C# support in either IDE is. Maybe something wrong with my setup, but autocompletions indeed suck (in addition to just wrong picks, editors often would suggest a symbol that doesn’t make sense from the typing perspective, as if there aren’t any language servers or intellisense or whatever).
VS code would also eat up the curly brace at the end of a class declaration when auto-generating a method skeleton.
They say it's vscode in the article. I can't say I've seen anything that egregious happen with unity in visual studio.
It's stuff like this though that keeps me from using vscode for code editing (I use it for markdown and JSON file editing only). I guess I don't know what I'm missing but it's never been a smooth experience for me. If I'm on Windows I tend to stick with visual studio.
Pretty sure you’re supposed to press return in order to accept a dropdown suggestion. Tab is for accepting the AI code completion. I disabled completions.
Pretty sure they hijacked a key most developers had a muscle memory of using since Visual Basic 6 to pump their AI usage metrics, and then invented a workaround that requires re-learning their tool.
Not a very clear issue report, but looks like a conflict between language features, copilot, and possibly snippets?
The project is open source and invites feedback in the form of issues, although sadly their issue report page is a bit of a cesspool - will really make you lose faith in humanity.
I think maybe vibe coders got to it and don’t realize that there are certain requirements to create useful feedback? Or maybe VS Code linking from the help menu is a bad idea.
This blog post is a step above the “doesn’t work is garbage” issues filed in GitHub, but only just one. What did the author try to fix? When did it stop working? What kind of projects? What extensions are installed?
> Not a very clear issue report, but looks like a conflict between language features, copilot, and possibly snippets?
Which is overwhelmingly the VS Code experience for any language. Everything feels shaky. I've had to report a bunch of irritating issues like the post for TypeScript - never fixed or resolved. I have never needed to report issues like this for C# in Visual Studio, and when I have tried C# in VS Code the experience makes me wonder if it's a bad joke.
Visual Studio has been doing wacky stuff to me like this when I am trying to start a LINQ statement and type a letter to be the lambda variable like Select(f => … but when I hit ‘f’ it just autocompletes some random model from some .NET api that starts with F that I then have to delete because why would I want FileStreamCombulator right now I’m trying to start a lambda??? and don’t remember it doing this in the past.
This is a company that cannot get "basic file search" working on their OS for 30+ years, I'm hardly holding my breath as they double-down on overcomplexity with even more overcomplexity.
Shout-out to FileLocator Pro as an aside.
Not a fan of Windows either, but playing devil’s advocate here: Apple’s Finder has steadily gotten worse over the last ~16 years, at least in my experience. It increasingly struggles with basic functionality.
There seems to be a pattern where higher market cap correlates with worse ~~tech~~ fundamentals.
Or the start menu search
yep, and FileSearchEX
Don't get me started on powershell!
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 deep and abiding love of Powershell but you are spot on.
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)
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.
It’s so weird, vscode worked flawlessly for me for years and after migrating to neovim a month or two ago I keep seeing complains.
Has there been a change lately and in the project, or is it just internet bias?
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.
Ohh, that's what has been happening when I've had tab completion fail recently! Thanks for mentioning it...
I thought I was going crazy, but it started feeling materially worse sometime in last few weeks.
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.
It's because Tab accepts copilot suggestion, you have to press Enter instead to accept the language server suggestion.
Yes, and what a mess it has been.
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.
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.
Reminds me of Windows Search.
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.
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 and update that caused doing so to break search entirely if that was set (totally a coincidence I'm sure).
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.
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.
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.
I switched from Sublime to VSCode years ago and have been fairly happy but the recent AI onslaught in VSCode is making me look at other editors.
I wonder if 30% of their code being written by AI has anything to do with it
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
Why do people still spend time worrying about M$ stuff…
Is there a GitHub issue for this?
Ditch VSCode, switch to Zed.
There are still plenty of things that VSCode does and Zed doesn't. E.g. Dart debugging.
Also there is the VC money problem with Zed, at some point, that money will want returns on every dollar spent.
I didnt think I would ever switch from vscode but Zed is very nice and my daily driver now.
Looks like Unity code. Not sure if it’s Visual Studio or VS Code, but yeah, it was baffling to me how weirdly bad C# support in either IDE is. Maybe something wrong with my setup, but autocompletions indeed suck (in addition to just wrong picks, editors often would suggest a symbol that doesn’t make sense from the typing perspective, as if there aren’t any language servers or intellisense or whatever).
VS code would also eat up the curly brace at the end of a class declaration when auto-generating a method skeleton.
I gave up and installed Rider. So far so good.
They say it's vscode in the article. I can't say I've seen anything that egregious happen with unity in visual studio.
It's stuff like this though that keeps me from using vscode for code editing (I use it for markdown and JSON file editing only). I guess I don't know what I'm missing but it's never been a smooth experience for me. If I'm on Windows I tend to stick with visual studio.
Maybe I should consider rider...
Pretty sure you’re supposed to press return in order to accept a dropdown suggestion. Tab is for accepting the AI code completion. I disabled completions.
Pretty sure they hijacked a key most developers had a muscle memory of using since Visual Basic 6 to pump their AI usage metrics, and then invented a workaround that requires re-learning their tool.
Fair point.
> Ivan was born at a very young age, this has made a lot of people very angry and is widely regarded as a bad move.
Lol
I think it originates from The Restarurant at the end of the Universe: https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/douglas_adams_125092
Jetbrains Rider is very nice. Especially with ideavim plugin.
And pretty fast these fast these days.
Microsoft VS peaked for me in 2013 to 2017 when they decoupled a bunch of things, specifically .NET
.NET feels better than ever right now. C# native type unions maybe next year will be a big highlight.
Not a very clear issue report, but looks like a conflict between language features, copilot, and possibly snippets?
The project is open source and invites feedback in the form of issues, although sadly their issue report page is a bit of a cesspool - will really make you lose faith in humanity.
https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues
I think maybe vibe coders got to it and don’t realize that there are certain requirements to create useful feedback? Or maybe VS Code linking from the help menu is a bad idea.
This blog post is a step above the “doesn’t work is garbage” issues filed in GitHub, but only just one. What did the author try to fix? When did it stop working? What kind of projects? What extensions are installed?
Aside: in the spirit of Christmas cheer, I’ll share this fun meme, completely (un)related to the topic at hand: https://old.reddit.com/r/github/comments/1at9br4/i_am_new_to...
> Not a very clear issue report, but looks like a conflict between language features, copilot, and possibly snippets?
Which is overwhelmingly the VS Code experience for any language. Everything feels shaky. I've had to report a bunch of irritating issues like the post for TypeScript - never fixed or resolved. I have never needed to report issues like this for C# in Visual Studio, and when I have tried C# in VS Code the experience makes me wonder if it's a bad joke.
Visual Studio has been doing wacky stuff to me like this when I am trying to start a LINQ statement and type a letter to be the lambda variable like Select(f => … but when I hit ‘f’ it just autocompletes some random model from some .NET api that starts with F that I then have to delete because why would I want FileStreamCombulator right now I’m trying to start a lambda??? and don’t remember it doing this in the past.