Does autocomplete promote brain rot?
There’s a longstanding debate over whether code completion features in editors are more harmful than they are helpful.
When I first started coding professionally, I found this feature incredibly intrusive.
Every time I’d type a few characters, my IDE (usually Visual Studio) would flash a menu at me, whether I wanted it or not. Frankly, the flickering was nauseating.
But once I realized how helpful autocomplete could be, I started to depend on it.
Now it’s hard to imagine doing much coding without some assistance from autocomplete.
Am I a less productive for not having memorized the names of more of the functions available in jQuery?
Maybe. I’d rather delegate as much of that type of work to my tools as I can, though, and save brain cycles for the harder work of writing code that I’ll still be able to read three months from now…
If you’re also fan of autocomplete in Sublime, you may have noticed an ever-so-slight delay before the autocomplete list appears.
That slight hesitation (it’s 50 milliseconds, if you’re keeping track at home) before the autocomplete list appears is controlled by a preference.
If you’d like to reduce or eliminate the lag, just override the auto_complete_delay setting in your preferences file.
I set mine to 0.
What can I say? I’m a programmer. If I’m going to rot my brain, I want to do it as efficiently as possible.
P.S. For more ways to get Sublime to do your thinking for you, check out http://sublimetexttips.com/newsletter