If Intellicode Whole Line Completions are displayed, the suggestions widget does not open

Does this issue occur when all extensions are disabled?: Yes/No

• VS Code Version: 1.60.0-insider (user setup)
• OS Version: Windows_NT x64 10.0.19043
• List of extensions that you have installed: Visual Studio IntelliCode Completions

Steps to Reproduce:

1. Open the attached .txt file, convert it to a typescript .ts file main.txt

2. In line 5, type s= and you should see a gray text IntelliCode completion.

3. When you type what the completion shows, and get to typing a dot, “.”.

4. When you type a “.”, it is expected you see the suggestions widget. But the suggestions widget does not show up in the presence of gray text completion.

5. GIF -

[jonahkagan]

Hey all, I wanted to share my thoughts as a user who’s been struggling with this problem for a while now. I’ve mainly felt this pain when using VS Code with TypeScript IntelliSense and Copilot. I was referred here from https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/157675.

I’ve found that IntelliSense and Copilot inline suggestions serve very different purposes in my coding flow. IntelliSense tells me what’s possible while Copilot tells me a best guess solution. I use IntelliSense when I’m not totally sure what I want to do but I want to see what my options are. I use Copilot when I know what I want but I don’t want to type it out. IntelliSense is like searching documentation intersected with the knowledge of the type system. Copilot is like pairing with someone who knows you so well they can finish your sentences for you.

Given that, my ideal behavior would be:

• Let Copilot keep making ghost text suggestions whenever it feels like it
• After typing a dot, show me IntelliSense and hide the Copilot ghost text

This would allow me to keep relying on Copilot to help speed up my typing but have a seamless way to indicate to VS Code when I’m interested in IntelliSense (typing a dot). (There are also other IntelliSense trigger characters where it would be useful to hide Copilot - e.g. typing an opening quote mark in a place where the type system knows a union of strings is being used.)

A few thoughts on other suggestions from this thread:

• Waiting til I type a character after the dot won’t work well in cases where I need to browse all the available methods on an object (which happens quite often, e.g. when using libraries).
• I don’t think it would bother me too much to show both Copilot ghost text and IntelliSense suggestions at the same time, but reading above that it was confusing for others seems like good user feedback that should be honored.
• I don’t think Copilot suggestions should be shown in the IntelliSense suggestion pop-up, since they are distinctly different kinds of suggestions. I want to maintain my mental model of ghost text being moderately-reliable AI suggestions and the popup being extremely-reliable type system suggestions.

I’m sure I have some blind spots as I’m just one user with a specific use case, but hopefully this feedback can help as you keep working on this problem.

[hediet]

After discussing with @isidorn, we suggest the following:

• Keep the old behavior of the last (1.60) release for now (in any case for 1.61 that gets released this week and currently equals the insiders build, but also for future releases). This means the suggest widget is being suppressed when there is an inline suggestion as it used to be.
• Wait for feedback of the intelli-code team and/or the release of their extension and then discuss further steps and revisit this discussion.