Nonword characters should trigger autocomplete

[rigdern]

Users shouldn't be required to hit tab/enter to autocomplete. Text should be autocompleted when you hit a nonword character (e.g. ".", "<>", "[]", "{}", "()"). For example, typing “document.bo” followed by a period should autocomplete to “document.body”.

Visual Studio supports this for C#. In VS, you can get this feature by unchecking the “Only use tab or enter to commit” checkbox in the intellisense options. It would be great to also have this functionality for TypeScript in Sublime.

[danquirk]

Note VS supports this for TypeScript in VS2015.

[rigdern]

It looks like this is currently broken in VS for TypeScript: microsoft/TypeScript#315

[danquirk]

The completion behavior you want is fixed in VS in microsoft/TypeScript#2482, the issue you referenced is just tracking the lack of an option to configure what characters cause the completion results to be committed.

[billti]

I'm not convinced this is the right behavior to add. As a general principle, we're trying to make our Sublime plug-in behave in a manner that will be very familiar to Sublime users, not try and recreate the Visual Studio experience. I'm not aware of any other Sublime plugins that provide this behavior (and the native behavior doesn't).

Beyond if we should do it, is if we can do it. I'm not sure the Sublime API is rich enough here. For example, we'd need to know when the completion list is no longer present in order not to then auto-complete on a character. Sublime has commands you can detect for when it is explicitly dismissed (hide_auto_complete), however there are a number of scenarios where it is implicitly dismissed that don't have notifications and are non-trivial to get right (e.g. moving the cursor, typing chars that cause no matches in the filtered list, etc...).