Why is inline autocomplete disabled by default?

re: Why is inline autocomplete disabled by default? ...aaaand you re-enable it how?

Gene — Wed, 02 Nov 2005 17:50:07 GMT

So how do you re-enable it? I had no clue that could be done and I was just stuck with crappy (to me - personal opinion) autocomplete.

re: Why is inline autocomplete disabled by default?

YoNoSoyTu — Wed, 02 Nov 2005 17:56:19 GMT

That is the default behaviour of Safari in Mac OS X and it drive me nuts. Nobody is perfect.

re: Why is inline autocomplete disabled by default?

Anonymous Coward — Wed, 02 Nov 2005 17:57:21 GMT

Sweeeeet! Thanks so much for fixing this, that behavior drives me insane.

re: Why is inline autocomplete disabled by default?

oldnewthing — Wed, 02 Nov 2005 18:00:09 GMT

Gene: Start -> Help and Support -> "enable inline autocomplete" -> #1 hit

re: Why is inline autocomplete disabled by default?

Ytram — Wed, 02 Nov 2005 18:08:28 GMT

Okay, having a real pain in the butt getting this posted for some reason.

I was basically going to say that inline AutoComplete doesn't work exactly as Raymond stated. It will only fill in each important substring, not the entire URL unless the entire URL is just a single domain. In general:

http://www.domain.com/subfolder1/subfolder2/.../subfolderN/somepage.html

If you start typing www.domain.com, IE will only inline complete the domain part of the URL. If you start typing subfolder1 it will only complete subfolder1, and so on until you get to the final slash in the URL in which case it will start trying to auto-complete the final page in the URL.

re: Why is inline autocomplete disabled by default?

Serge Wautier — Wed, 02 Nov 2005 18:09:03 GMT

This is IMO one of the lamest 'improvements in VS 2003 : same inline autocomplete in File/Open dialog. How the hell do you easily open a .h file ? autocomplete always wants to open the .cpp :-(

I hope this is 'fixed' in VS 2005

re: Why is inline autocomplete disabled by default?

Vitor — Wed, 02 Nov 2005 18:27:23 GMT

I just don't understand why isn't inline autocomplete only doing what you want, which is the main domain "http://www.microsoft.com"?
Isn't that possible? I mean, that's what most people would want anyway.
And if they really want a section of the site, then inline autocomplete would include "/windows" if the user types the "/" after the domain name.
Why is this so hard to do?

re: Why is inline autocomplete disabled by default?

Uhrak — Wed, 02 Nov 2005 18:36:05 GMT

.. especially when everybody other does that already.

re: Why is inline autocomplete disabled by default?

Ytram — Wed, 02 Nov 2005 18:44:30 GMT

Vitor and Uhrak: Read my comment above, that IS how IE works with inline auto-complete. Except that a user typing in www.microsoft.com/ will still just auto-complete to the domain name. Auto-completion after the domain will not occur until they start typing something after the slash.

re: Why is inline autocomplete disabled by default?

mph — Wed, 02 Nov 2005 18:56:21 GMT

I have a slightly different beef with IE6 autocomplete.

Let's say I want to go to www.microsoft.com. I start typing in the address, but I make a typo:

www.n

At this point, IE autocompletes the URL to, say, www.newegg.com. But I'm typing blind, and can feel that I hit the wrong key. I hit backspace to delete the "n" and hit "m", like I meant to. But the backspace actually just deletes the part that autocompletion filled in ("ewegg.com"), so I now have:

www.nmicrosoft.com

Twenty years of experience hitting backspace when I make a typo, and it no longer works. Worse yet, there's a race condition: Sometimes I realize my mistake before autocomplete does its thing, and sometimes I don't. The effect of hitting backspace depends on which happens first.

re: Why is inline autocomplete disabled by default?

Skywing — Wed, 02 Nov 2005 19:03:50 GMT

mph: Actually, for me (when using IE6), backspace deletes the character I typed last and not the autocompleted text, which is not actually included in the text field until I hit the down arrow key to accept autocomplete suggestion.

The shell Run dialog works the same way for me, too.

re: Why is inline autocomplete disabled by default?

Prasenjeet Dutta — Wed, 02 Nov 2005 19:45:10 GMT

Raymond is spot on - inline autocomplete is lousy. Now someone send this blog post to the Office team -- Office's Open/Save As dialogs STILL use inline autocomplete and I get a twinge of irritation every time I have to use its dialogs.

re: Why is inline autocomplete disabled by default?

mph — Wed, 02 Nov 2005 20:42:04 GMT

Skywing, I don't know a lot about MS products, but for me it works as I described. I'm using IE 6.0.2800.1106 on Windows 2000.

re: Why is inline autocomplete disabled by default?

Jerry Pisk — Wed, 02 Nov 2005 21:16:11 GMT

VS 2005 (and possibly earlier versions too) has another "feature" like this - Intellisense uses the first option in its list even if you don't select it and hit tab. Forget about getting a tab inserted. I filed a bug report but it was closed as "by design". Oh well.

re: Why is inline autocomplete disabled by default?

Mark Steward — Wed, 02 Nov 2005 21:20:23 GMT

mph:

Windows XP by default appears to disable inline autocomplete (so only the drop-down menu appears), whereas I remember 2000 having it enabled by default.

Try changing it in IE's Advanced Settings - I'm pretty sure the change applies to the Run dialog box too.

I too get annoyed by Office's messy Open box (looks ugly, doesn't copy the rest of the system, ect ect). It should do its own stuff only on old platforms (e.g. Win9x).

re: Why is inline autocomplete disabled by default?

mph — Wed, 02 Nov 2005 22:08:22 GMT

Thanks, Mark! Inline autocomplete can indeed be disabled in the advanced settings.

re: Why is inline autocomplete disabled by default?

Rowland Shaw — Wed, 02 Nov 2005 22:13:33 GMT

More annoying is typing a UNC path in Windows Explorer's address bar, just to have it 'select all' whilst typing, with the net result of removing the first half of the hostname and or sharename.
Consistantly annoying.

re: Why is inline autocomplete disabled by default?

Puckdropper — Wed, 02 Nov 2005 22:26:13 GMT

Would [CTRL]+[TAB] work for autocomplete in dialog boxes? IMO, it's easier to hit those two keys rather than the down arrow (which, on a standard 101 key keyboard requires moving your hands from the alphabet keys to another part of the KB altogether.)

I just tried [CTRL]+[TAB] and it worked the same way as just [TAB].

To the Windows teams' credit, Windows has always been excellent about providing an easy way to navigate around with either keyboard or mouse. Since I don't have space for a mouse on every machine I'm working on, I usually just plug in a keyboard and go.

re: Why is inline autocomplete disabled by default?

Wed, 02 Nov 2005 22:31:35 GMT

Whoa! There's a "Browse" button in the Run dialog? I think I use that dialog 50 times a day. I never knew it existed.

re: Why is inline autocomplete disabled by default?

oldnewthing — Wed, 02 Nov 2005 23:06:20 GMT

Ctrl+Tab is the "change tabs on a property sheet" hotkey. Using it for autocomplete means that an autocomplete inside a property sheet would have a hotkey conflict.

re: Why is inline autocomplete disabled by default?

Cooney — Thu, 03 Nov 2005 01:29:54 GMT

It'd also change tabs in Firefox and, I assume IE7.

re: Why is inline autocomplete disabled by default?

Ulric — Thu, 03 Nov 2005 02:33:43 GMT

The behaviour in Safari, i.e. the old IE behaviour, also drives me mad. I am fighting the autocomplete *every day* as described in the log entry, for example to go to the main page of my blog vs the /wp-admin sub-page (which I had to type in originally ).

re: Why is inline autocomplete disabled by default?

Sylveste — Thu, 03 Nov 2005 03:41:57 GMT

Personally I make sure to always enable inline autocomplete because I like the fact that it saves me time and generally gets it right.

Yes, I have to look at the screen when I type. No, I don't find this a problem.

However, the IE implementation is much better than the firefox one - the IE one just fills in the relevant substrings as mentioned above, whereas the firefox one just fills in the last complete URL you typed and doesn't do any splitting on slashes, as well as having a few other flaws.

In general I find the IE and MS implementations to be very useful and always inline autocomplete.

re: Why is inline autocomplete disabled by default?

Norman Diamond — Thu, 03 Nov 2005 05:41:00 GMT

The new autocomplete has problems too. I'm glad that the old autocomplete defaults to off now, for the same reason you stated. But in the new autocomplete, when IE automatically opens a dropdown box and highlights one of the entries, the highlight is false. A frequent example: I type http://k and as soon as I hit the k, IE displays a dropdown box with the entry for http://kakaku.com/news highlighted. I hit the Enter key, IE tries to open http://k which doesn't exist, and then either gives a DNS error or sometimes I stop it first. If I backspace out of the k, press the k again, and use arrow keys to move downwards and then back upwards in the dropdown list, then the highlighted entry is really selected.

re: Why is inline autocomplete disabled by default?

Neil — Thu, 03 Nov 2005 19:00:59 GMT

"Even using Tab as the autocomplete character suffers from the same flaw."

So why hasn't this one been disabled yet? I've had to learn the Alt+F shortcut for Open as Web Folder because I find Esc, Tab confusing - I expect Esc to undo the autocomplete and Enter to finish the autocomplete without submitting the dialog.

re: Why is inline autocomplete disabled by default?

m,f. — Thu, 03 Nov 2005 19:04:04 GMT

To: Norman Diamond

Yes, that happened to me countless times (when i used to use IE...)!

re: Why is inline autocomplete disabled by default?

Hexar — Thu, 03 Nov 2005 22:09:27 GMT

Inline autocomplete annoys the crap out of me. Excel 2003 still does it too, according to previously entered fields elsewhere in the worksheet. This is annoying; let's say I have a previously filled out cell called "Foo Bar" and now I want to enter "Foo" in a cell. If I just type "Foo", and press enter, then "Foo Bar" gets entered. Great. The best method I have for avoiding this is to type "Foo", hit the spacebar, then hit backspace, and this will disable autocomplete long enough for me to move on.

re: Why is inline autocomplete disabled by default?

Dan McCarty — Fri, 04 Nov 2005 23:18:21 GMT

Want to go to microsoft.com in IE? Just go to the address bar and type "microsoft" then hit Ctrl+Enter. IE auto-adds the "www." and ".com" parts of the URL and loads it.

The words offender of auto-complete IMO isn't IE, but the Run dialog. So it pops up a list of most-recently used items, but to select them you have to use your mouse or move your fingers over to the arrow keys. It makes the list useless; it's faster for me to just type the entire path. Raymond's argument against using Tab is easily countered by using Esc to dismiss the list, then using tab to move to another control. Or just use Alt+b.

BTW, to the haters of auto-complete: once you get used to it it really is faster (honestly, they didn't do all this research and come out with a technology what was slower). But if you're not used to it or don't understand how it works it will slow you down and frustrate you. For most apps that have some kind auto-complete feature there is a way to turn it off.

re: Why is inline autocomplete disabled by default?

David Walker — Sun, 06 Nov 2005 22:08:48 GMT

Hexar: That's an option under Tools/Options, on the Edit tab, called "Enable Autocomplete for cell values". At least that's where the option lives in Excel 2000; Excel 2003 should have it in a similar place.

If a software product like Excel has a feature you don't like, such as Autocomplete, it might just turn out that opening the product's Help and typing in some word like, oh, let's say, Autocomplete (in the Answer wizard OR the Index, either one) will reveal a topic called "Turn on or off automatically completing entries in columns". The answer to changing the behavior is both discoverable and documented!

re: Why is inline autocomplete disabled by default?

Norman Diamond — Mon, 07 Nov 2005 06:54:27 GMT

Ooooooh yeah, did someone say Excel? I haven't tried Excel 2003 yet, but here's that really neat autocomplete feature in earlier versions. The way the IME works, often the Enter key is the only reasonable way to confirm the selected Kanji or even the plain input hiragana or katakana. And in Excel, one press of the Enter key both does a confirmation to the IME and an unwanted autocomplete confirmation to Excel. Then you can't even just do a single backspace to back out of the unwanted autocompletion, you have to back out one character at a time (or use the mouse to select the autocompleted portion). Why doesn't it take two separate presses to do these two unrelated operations? One keystroke to use the IME as normal. Then offer the autocompletion and accept one more Enter keystroke to confirm or backspace or other input to kill the offered autocompletion. Fortunately I don't have to use Excel every day.

Oh and then there was the skilful typist who skilfully used autocomplete so that every program written by one person would be reassigned to join every program written by one other person, because both of those persons had the same first name. Didn't even have to use the Japanese version of Excel to do that.

re: Why is inline autocomplete disabled by default?

mdi — Mon, 07 Nov 2005 21:46:29 GMT

Ctrl+Tab is also used for switching beetween MDI child windows.

My Favorite (hidden) IE feature

Bit-cycling — Wed, 23 Aug 2006 14:24:35 GMT

Whenever I install Windows on a new PC (which in my daily work happens fair more frequently than I care...

My Favorite (hidden) IE feature

Bit-cycling — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 10:03:05 GMT

Whenever I install Windows on a new PC (which in my daily work happens fair more frequently than I care