I did Python programming a lot before using Julia so I missed this feature too. That’s why I made ANN: InteractiveCodeSearch.jl --- Interactively search Julia code (sorry, no intention for a plug). I don’t think object.<hit tab> is the only interactive method discovery UI. InteractiveCodeSearch is a quick hack at it but I think we can do more. For example, it would be nice to have a keyboard shortcut to find a minimal subexpression surrounding a cursor, inference the type of it, and then run @searchmethods on it.
(As for the star import, @rdeits did a perfect answer so I have nothing important to add.)