Tooltips obscure the code I'm working on

This may well be a VSCode flaw at its root, but I thought I’d start by flagging it here, since it may be exacerbated by design decisions we’ve made.

I frequently find myself not being able to see the code I’m writing, even though I’m on a large 4K+ display. The following screenshot illustrates this well:

In this example, I’m currently writing a new test, so am halfway through typing expect. IntelliSense is giving me code completion and documentation on what I’m writing, but since there’s no more room to the right of the code I’m entering, it shows it on the left, obscuring my cursor.

Here’s another example:

Here I can at least see the line of code that I’m writing, but not the previous lines. This again makes it very hard for me to see what I’m working on.

I imagine the layout algorithm is challenging; from a DartCode side, I wonder whether we need such a large wall of text, which gives VSCode limited opportunity to find a good place for it. A smaller, scrollable region might be better, since Dart is known for its exhaustive inline documentation.

[timsneath]

The extension is cool, although it sometimes only shows some of the data in the tooltip, I suspect for the reasons you note.

I need to turn off the popups though – the extension doesn’t automatically do that, as far as I can tell. Just installing it without further configuration was not the magic bullet I’d hoped for, obviously. Thanks for the tips about Ctrl+Shift+Space / Ctrl+Space – I’ll play around with that.

I’m intrigued by the possibility of a Dart-specific documentation pane. We have such good docs, and a dedicated pane could include useful information (e.g. graphics and hyperlinks) that simply wouldn’t fit in a popup tooltip.

@inmatrix might be interested in this as a topic for UX research.

[jacob314]

I was just wondering about a Dart-specific documentation pane as well. I’d love to see the doc pane include both the doc comment for the class (which typically has a lot more relevant content than the constructor) and the doc comment for the constructor I’ve selected.