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Code Completion

Code completion is a feature used in live programming that actively reads the user's current code in context to present code suggestions in real-time. The code suggestions may be intended to complete the code for efficiency or improve the code quality.

Code Completion Tools

1. GitHub Co-Pilot: A Code Completion Tool

GitHub Code Pilot

Benefits:

  • Autocompletion of verbose boilerplate code
    • For example, constructors, getters, setters, and other common code
    • Writing mocks for unit tests
  • Auto-generated code suggestions based on:
    • function names
    • descriptive comments
    • existing code
  • Easy to get started, and works automatically
  • Works with many common languages including Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, Ruby, Go, C#, or C++.

Downsides:

  • Experience is limited in offline scenarios.

Usage:

Install the VS Code Extension, and log in to your Microsoft GitHub Account.

Sign Up:

GitHub-CoPilot - Home Page

Docs:

GitHub-CoPilot - GitHub - Docs

2. VS Code's Intellisense

Visual Studio Code - Intellisense

Benefits:

  • Native feature of VS Code
  • Works with many common languages out of the box (JavaScript, TypeScript, JSON, HTML, CSS, SCSS, and Less)
  • Has a marketplace for additional code completion extensions needed for other languages like Python, C/C++, C#, Java, Go, plus more.
  • Works offline

Downsides:

  • Can conflict with GitHub CoPilot if both are enabled.

Usage:

Install the VS Code. Install additional extensions for additional language support.

Docs:

VSCode Intellisense - Docs

Last update: March 17, 2023