Turn off Intellisense by file type and scope

[nathanhammond]

• VSCode Version: 1.4.0
• OS Version: OS X 10.11.3

Steps to Reproduce:

1. Create Markdown file.
2. Begin typing.
3. After writing enough you end up getting Intellisense prompts for every new word you write:

This makes for a terrible Markdown editing experience.

[jrieken]

@nathanhammond As a global workaround you can turn off all textual completions with editor.wordBasedCompletion: false

[nathanhammond]

@jrieken Indeed, but that cure is worse than the malady since the majority of the time I do want (and benefit tremendously) from textual completions.

So rather than do that I simply moved my markdown editing into a different tool (also suboptimal).

[zachCatalyst]

I've notice the same behaviour editing markdown that actually drove me to another tool (just for Markdown). Often I'll have a short todo list or notes in a plain text file this will happen to also, less often / irritating but similar.

I would love to see something like:

// blanket disabled for everything
editor.wordBasedCompletion: false

// blanket enabled for everything
editor.wordBasedCompletion: true

// on for everything except for file types in the exclude list.
editor.wordBasedCompletion: {
exclude: [".md", ".txt", ".text"]
}

// off for everything except for file types in the inclusion list.
editor.wordBasedCompletion: {
include: [".js", ".cs"]
}

[jrieken]

Understood - I will tackle this in September. With it we should also think about configuring word based completions wrt strings and comments. Tho not interesting for markdown folks like or hate it...

[nathanhammond]

A "grand unified plan" of configuring it would be fantastic and I'm in no particular rush. Blacklists or whitelists at a global level provide some alleviation as a quick fix, but if instead everything were context aware you could provided completions inside of a Markdown code block that is annotated for a language.

```javascript
setTimeout(...

So your proposal for taking context into account is valuable in many scenarios. So please don't feel unnecessarily pressured into the "quick fix" solution and take the time to design the solution that you actually want.

[jrieken]

@nathanhammond fyi with the January release we have enabled language specific settings, so you could have:

"editor.wordBasedCompletion": true,
"[markdown]": {
  "editor.wordBasedCompletion": false
}

[nathanhammond]

@jrieken Thanks for the ping, that does make life far smoother. The language specific settings actually work as a simple but elegant design. Regardless of how it is implemented now (maybe as a file type switch?) it allows for a future in which you detect the scope.

Given you're closing things as duplicates of this issue I'll leave it open as a tracking issue for the thoughts you have on this. 😄

[jrieken]

dupe of #1657