microsoft / microsoft/AL

Autocomplete on dot, parenthesis, and semicolon

Open
#2,501 2 comments 3 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

Nobody has claimed this yet.

enhancement intellisense
Dominant language
PowerShell
Stars
881
Forks
285
Avg merge
3d 36m
Merged PRs (30d)
1

Description

In Visual Studio Code there is this user setting:

  // Controls if suggestions should be accepted on commit characters. For instance in JavaScript the semi-colon (';') can be a commit character that accepts a suggestion and types that character.
  "editor.acceptSuggestionOnCommitCharacter": true,

As the comment mentions, what this does is accept the autocomplete suggestion not just on enter/tab, but also when entering certain characters that are usually used after the suggested text.

For example, if programming in Javascript you would write (as typed on the keyboard):

win.al('hello');

And Visual Studio will confirm the suggestion after each '.' and '('. So the resulting code would actually be:

window.alert('hello');

Now, what characters accept the suggestion depend on the language, and AL doesn't seem to autocomplete on any of the characters that would usually continue a suggestion. For example: '.', '(' and ';' just write the specified char, cancelling the selected suggestion.

It would be great if the NAV extension supported this setting. Specially for those of us who also work with C# or Javascript and keep cancelling suggestions by mistake, when writing AL code! :)

P.S. I checked that this was not implemented in version 0.17.19506.

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

The issue names no files, tests, or entry points. Start by locating the AL language extension's completion and commit-character handling, then compare its behavior with Visual Studio Code's acceptSuggestionOnCommitCharacter setting. Done means characters such as '.', '(' and ';' accept the selected suggestion instead of cancelling it.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
vscode
Domain
developer-experience
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
35/100

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.