Autocomplete in editor

Programming Groovy
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Is there a way to implement autocomplete in the online editor?

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+1. That is crucially missing right now :confused:

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I am confused, for sure. We have not had it for years, what makes it crucial and “crucial right now”? What has changed?

It might be nice, but not positive it is crucial as people have been succeeding (and perhaps even doing better than if they were assisted with auto-completion as there is value in muscle memory) for years with out it.

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I decided recently to start using Exercism (which is awesome by the way!) and since I am always moving, I’d like to do the exercices through the online editor.

However, autocompletion is implemented in all popular editors (VSCode, IntelliJ) and makes it indeed very practical to code more efficiently.

I don’t know if Exercism has not implemented it on purpose to force learners to explicitly type in every single character and reinforce muscle memory etc ?

If yes then that make sense indeed not to implement it. If no, then I see no reason why the online editor would not implement it, as it is done every elsewhere, making life easier for learners when typing code.

That’s my opinion though. I’d be curious to get others opinions :)

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I would suggest that a reason it might appear in commercial software and not in Exercism is that Exercism’s annual budget is about $200k, and Microsoft’s spend on Visual Studio is probably in between $20M and $200M And that other companies like Replit raised 100x more investment last year alone than Exercism has spent in the last decade.

There are ways to do this, using Language Servers. We started implementing this a couple of years ago, it was a huge amount of effort, we didn’t get enough community momentum, and so we gave up on it. It would also be another reasonable substantial expense on our bills to have language servers for 70 languages.

My general attitude is now that if you want to use a text editor, you can use the online editor, if you want to use an IDE you have to use an IDE. I would love for Exercism to have an IDE for each language but it’s not feasible.

I’m really glad you’re enjoying Exercism and grateful to you for posting and asking the question :slight_smile:

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