Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Tyriar 174 days ago
> So, Lord have mercy on my soul if I have a new hire tell me "I don't know how to use the regular terminals. All I can use is VSCode's terminal." I think sometimes things should be hard, but I don't think terminal autocomplete is very hard. Just hit tab a few times and it'll do its thing or -h.

Thanks for the insights. Something I've learned here is that the vast majority of users don't change their defaults or seek out features they may find very useful. Discoverability vs simplicity/bloat is a hard problem and that's essentially the issue here.

I made a note on the issue that with the planned changes to make it easier to configure, we should consider not overriding tab by default anymore. That would mean that only down arrow is bound by default which would then put focus into the widget.

> I'm going to have to look through my settings to try and turn that all off.

Full details at https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/configure/telemetry, but setting `"telemetry.telemetryLevel": "off"` will disable usage/crash/error telemetry for the VS Code core. Just keep in mind extensions may or may not respect that.

Here's that specific event if you're interested: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/blob/b0e9dce905d12646801...
3 comments
lukevp 174 days ago
I agree with the point that making the VS Code terminal behave in a special manner without opt-in is going to be disruptive to newer engineers. Why not make it a shell plugin instead and offer to install/customize the shell the first time someone launches a new shell in VS Code instead? Then it changes it system wide, like oh-my-zsh or something would.
link
Neywiny 174 days ago
While I agree that new feature adoption is hard, changing tab completion is a bit hardcore. I agree that a different key bind, maybe right arrow key, or shift tab, or something would have been better.
link
Dusseldorf 174 days ago
Here's a suggestion: maybe you could not track all of our activity extremely invasively by default, and allow those who would like to provide feedback and tracking to enable it on their own. Crazy thought, I know.
link