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Comment by imh | Hacker News Reader

I wish someone would figure out the right UX for partial autocompletion. e.g. I type "wo" and my phone suggests ("would", "work", "wonder"), there should be an easy way to say I'm trying to type "working" rather than clicking the "work" autocomplete then backspace, then "ing".

I'd imaging TabNine has this problem in spades, since it does such long autocompletes. It could suggest "unsigned long long" when I've typed "unsi" and I really want "unsigned long int". Seems like a tough UX problem. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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Xcode has handled this for years. In Xcode, when autocompletion is presented, hitting Tab will complete the longest unique prefixed subword for the currently-selected tab item. If this results in only having one completion option left, then it completes the whole thing (e.g. adding method arguments and whatnot). Similarly, hitting Return will just complete the whole entry instead of the longest unique prefixed subword.

By that I mean if you have 2 autocompletion options `addDefaultFoo()` and `addDefaultBar()`, and you type `add` to get those options, hitting Tab will fill in `addDefault`, and then hitting Tab again will fill in the rest of the selection.

*nix shells typically do something very similar, where hitting tab auto-completes up to the first forking character

After recently binge-watching The Good Place, this comment rattled me :)

Lol, I wasn't the only one!

Which is The Good Place of computer languages?

Lisp? Up front appears to be written with one thing in mind: Infuriate you with brackets.

Then, once you've worked out how to deal with the brackets, it's pretty forking sweet.

Never seen The Good Place so I'm just trying to figure out what the frak you all are taking about.

The longest-unique-prefixed-subword is the completion that bash (and tcsh and many other shells) have had for ~30 years now. The non-uniques are listed on the 2nd tab.

Sounds like what you want is fuzzy searching (say fzf [0]) over autocomplete suggestion results. You could type the prefix, and then fuzzy search by typing the suffix to get your desired word (while letting autocomplete fill in the middle of the word).

[0] https://github.com/junegunn/fzf

Fwiw, if there are competing `unsigned long int` autocompletes, it looks like it will shorten the recommendation to `unsigned long `, which is really neat.

This is just based on the site, I've not tried it yet. YMMV

UX-wise holding tab would be the best, meaning tab => use completion (like it works now), holding tab => use this completion but show me further possible completions of that word; if it doesn't have any just keep the caret there (for me to finish it writing manually)

I feel the same way. Wish I could force/long tap the proper root word and then select the proper 'conjugation'.

This can work with camel casing. So you type UnsiLI, then enter.

Typing an 'r' is faster than clicking on "work" then backspacing.

That can lead to ("Work", "Worry", "Word") so you'd then have to type the 'k'. Now you could have ("Work", "Worker", "Worked") and still are missing the variant you want.

It'd be nice to long press "Work" at step one, get that completed without a space being inserted, then tap 'i' to get ("Working", "Workings", "Workingmen")

Whilst they're doing that how about adding caret-placement sensitivity:

When I click just after the initial letter (pipe representing caret that would be) eg "w|orking" the chances of me wanting to type "worked" are pretty slim; instead it should offer "Dorking" (a UK placename), "borking" and such; according to my frecency scores.

Similarly if I click to place the caret at "work|s" I'm probably after "words" or "worts" (beer stuff), or similar. Again "working|" and I'm probably going to change to a different suffix - works, workers, worked.

I'm amazed that gboard (Google's Android keyboard) doesn't already do that? Perhaps I missed a setting.

It turns out that iOS prediction will make a provisional guess based on what you typed and will go back and adjust its autocorrections as you type subsequent words. You can see this more clearly if you use dictation, but allegedly it won't do as well if you use the word corrections every time.

I’ve noticed that. All my work-related jargon is suggested pretty damn well when it’s appropriate.

What I fear is that the autocomplete can reveal my NSFW jargon. It’s the same keyboard even when Safari is in Private Mode, right?

The way I use autocomplete is that I type the entire word I mean really quickly. I get most (or all) of it wrong, but the autocompleter has enough information to substitute that with the correct word. It's much faster than the read-evaluate-correct loop you're describing.

Which doesn't have anything to do with the problem decribed. He doesn't want to write "wor" but "working".

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