punctual-intellisense README

Ports the simple (yet addictive) Visual Studio feature of accepting intellisense suggestions using the punctuation that will follow the suggestion. This puts the developer into a "forward thinking" posture in which after seeing the correct suggestion, he's already thinking about the code that follows after it.

VSCode sort of does this already, but not consistantly, and not in proper undo order.

Features

• Accepts intellisense suggestion when the user taps any designated punctuation key, then writes that punctuation. Behavior is modeled after Visual Studio.
• When . used, the next suggestion widget is triggered.
• If typing punctuation is desired without accepting the suggestion, the user can tap Esc to exit the suggestion widget before typing the punctuation.
• In case the user wants to type a designated key but accepts a suggestion without intending to, accepting the suggestion is on the top of the undo stack. This allows the user to undo the suggestion while keeping the punctuation.
• Allows user to define which keys through settings.json.

Extension Settings

This extension contributes the following settings:

• punctual-intellisense.typeForwardKeys: Array of keys which will accept an Intellisense suggestion before being typed. If unspecified through user settings, the extension default keys will be used. If specified, every desired key must be included.

The default keys are: .,!@#%^&*()-=+[]{}<>/?|~;: and space

Known Issues

• . is the accessor in many languages, but not all. At this time, only those languages for which it is are supported (as far as triggering the next suggestion widget). Future feature may allow for different behaviors per language, if there's public demand for it.
• This does not work well alongside VSCode's JSON editing, so the functionality is bypassed when editing JSON.
• If the selected suggestion is a snippet, the previous word will be deleted upon typing. To my knowledge, this cannot be defended against due to VSCode extension API limitation. Logged at microsoft/vscode#44155. For now until a solution can be found, this is an easily avoidable scenario.