Test: Terminal PowerShell Intellisense

[Tyriar]

Refs: #154662, #221977, #223063, #222408, #222302, #222068

• macOS @aiday-mar
• windows @andreamah
• windows @sbatten

Complexity: 5

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Setup

• Install PowerShell 7 https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/scripting/install/installing-powershell-on-windows?view=powershell-7.4
• Set "terminal.integrated.suggest.enabled": true
• Set "terminal.integrated.shellIntegration.enabled": true (default)
• Set "terminal.integrated.developer.devMode": true. This is a hidden setting which enables this status bar item that shows VS Code's understanding of the prompt.
• Set the default profile to pwsh
  
• Set log level to trace, use the button on the right to make it sticky across reloads
  

To make sure everything is working, try open a pwsh terminal and make sure you see this circle in the gutter, that means that shell integration is working correctly:

You should be able to then type any character and an intellisense popup should appear:

When it's shown up is driven by terminal.integrated.suggest.quickSuggestions and terminal.integrated.suggest.suggestOnTriggerCharacters, but can also be manually invoked with ctrl+space.

Diagnostics

The dev mode status bar is useful to include in issue reports where the problem is likely caused by a bad prompt understanding:

Also when completions are incorrect the Pty Host output trace log is useful:

Test

This iteration saw a lot of changes to our experimental PowerShell intellisense:

Please try use the terminal with the feature enabled and see where it's good, where it gets in the way and test some of the improvements mentioned below.

• Better reliability!
• Completions will now show exactly what will be typed, this fixes some problems with highlighting in the suggest widget
• Polished the cd <path> experience: / or \ is added to the end of suggestions such that they request completions immediately after accepting.
• For directory completions, / and \ are filtered the same
• New terminal.integrated.suggest.runOnEnter setting which configures whether pressing enter will execute the command or just complete.
• Faster start up, at the cost of requesting "global" completions when first typing
  • A consequence of this is that it's possible to get into a state where they are stale. If you hit this I'd be interested to hear what happened. To workaround it you can run the Terminal: Clear Suggest Cache command or just toggle the suggest.enabled setting.
• File-specific completion scoring: Files are sorted by file name length ascending, then by file extension.
• File extensions get score boosts depending on the platform. For example ps1/bat/cmd get a boost on Windows and bat/cmd get a negative boost on non-Windows.
• Built-in git completions (terminal.integrated.suggest.builtinCompletions)
• Built-in code and code-insiders completions (terminal.integrated.suggest.builtinCompletions)
  • ⚠️ The VS Code completions are very basic and not currently context aware, don't spend long on this part. The work in progress is being included since it's better than nothing.

[aiday-mar]

I am not sure if I setup my environment correctly to test this plan item. I installed powershell on MacOS, then opened an integrated powershell in VS Code. I was typing cd, a completion appeared, and then I expected that pressing Tab would accept the completion. Pressing Tab made the completion disappear. To accept the completion, I had to use the right arrow key. This seems to contradict the terminal.integrated.suggest.runOnEnter setting description, which mentions that the Tab key can be used to accept the result. In particular I am not able to test using the Enter key or the Tab key to accept a completion. Am I testing correctly?

Screen.Recording.2024-07-23.at.10.52.38.mov

[Tyriar]

FYI what @aiday-mar was seeing is ghost text for history that is provided by pwsh itself, not us. So this feature is unrelated:

[andreamah]

Hmm. I can't seem to get completions on linux.

@Tyriar do you know what I could be doing wrong?

[andreamah]

Currently blocked on this due to the problem above, which might be fixed by #223374 in the next release.