Object-oriented languages make use of the obj.fun syntax for function calls. If the user types obj. and then presses TAB, he/she can immedietly learn about the available functions. The Julia story is more challenging, but I wonder if we could ever provide tooling to improve the discoverability of f…

You can do this with ?(x, tab. Or use shifttab to include all the completely untyped ::Any methods, too. It’s… not the most useful thing in the world. Perhaps it’d be slightly better if the default tab behavior only gave you non-Any answers in slot you “filled in”. julia> ?(r"str"#TAB rem(x, y, …

[image] juliohm: If the user types obj. and then presses TAB, he/she can immedietly learn about the available functions. Not exactly. Given a statically known class of said obj, we can discover the methods encapsulated by that class (this might be generalized to some other ways of organizing …

There is a difference, but it’s hard to see. I do think it should probably behave like methodswith in the default (non-shift) case. julia> ?(r"str", "s", 2#TAB broadcast(f::Tf, As...) where Tf @ Base.Broadcast broadcast.jl:810 broadcast!(f::Tf, dest, As::Vararg{Any, N}) where {Tf, N} @ Base.Broad…

I think you misunderstood my question. Say I have an instance of a Diagonal matrix: julia> using LinearAlgebra julia> A = Diagonal([1,2,3]) 3×3 Diagonal{Int64, Vector{Int64}}: 1 ⋅ ⋅ ⋅ 2 ⋅ ⋅ ⋅ 3 and that I am curious to learn what I can do with it. I tried pressing ?A#TAB but that only s…

You’re doing name autocomplete in help mode. Stay in REPL mode, and the parentheses is not optional: <Space>?(A<Tab> There is a fair bit of Diagonal in that list but it’s probably not the neat list anybody really wants. Unfortunately methodswidth doesn’t help much here. If you try the exact type of…

Got it. That definitely isn’t user-friendly. I am thinking of someone using the REPL and exploring the methods with TAB. So ideally that user would just type something after the expression and press a trigger. A. and then TAB or A# and then TAB, … After learning the options, the user can press a s…

obj.fun doesn’t start typical calls, so the trigger would just be obj. But we wouldn’t want to trigger it with just TAB. obj. does start property syntax, and TAB after that already looks for encapsulated names. That’s just much less useful when we don’t have classes encapsulating important methods. …

Any character would do it. Doesn’t need to be . It could be # or & or any other character not taken yet for autocompletion.

Maybe spaceless ?<TAB>, that’s already invalid to the parser and intuitive for a keyboard shortcut query.

Something like that could make a huge difference. My personal experience from training courses is that most participants struggle finding functions even when the packages have very extensive documentation. They wish they had a simple TAB like they have in other languages.

Autocompletion and function/method discoverability

Internals & Design

xgdgsc August 1, 2025, 2:21am 14

Use my fork at Looking for opinion on dot methods completion implementation - #4 by xgdgsc . Some instructions at Release A quick dot methods completion demo · xgdgsc/julia-vscode · GitHub .

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Autocompletion and function/method discoverability

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