Prioritizing snippets in autocomplete suggestions

[saadq]

Prerequisites

• Put an X between the brackets on this line if you have done all of the following:
  • Reproduced the problem in Safe Mode: http://flight-manual.atom.io/hacking-atom/sections/debugging/#using-safe-mode
  • Followed all applicable steps in the debugging guide: http://flight-manual.atom.io/hacking-atom/sections/debugging/
  • Checked the FAQs on the message board for common solutions: https://discuss.atom.io/c/faq
  • Checked that your issue isn't already filed: https://github.com/issues?utf8=✓&q=is%3Aissue+user%3Aatom
  • Checked that there is not already an Atom package that provides the described functionality: https://atom.io/packages

Description

When there are autocomplete options available, they often push the user snippets suggetsions near the bottom. Is there any way to always keep user snippets at the top of the autocomplete suggestion?

Steps to Reproduce

Have a JavaScript variable called close and have a cl snippet for console.log. cl + Tab will autocomplete to close.

Expected behavior: [What you expect to happen]
cl + Tab will autocomplete to console.log.

Actual behavior: [What actually happens]
cl + Tab will autocomplete to close.

Reproduces how often: [What percentage of the time does it reproduce?]
N/A

Versions

Atom : 1.23.3
Electron: 1.6.15
Chrome : 56.0.2924.87
Node : 7.4.0

apm 1.18.12
npm 3.10.10
node 6.9.5 x64
atom 1.23.3
python 2.7.12
git 2.10.1

OS: macOS Sierra Version 10.12.6

[Aerijo]

I'm not getting this with the subsequence provider. I have:

# snippets.cson
'.source.js':
  'cl':
      prefix: 'cl'
      body: 'console.log($1);$2'

and the result is:

You will need to provide more information on how to reproduce, what settings you have, the provider you're using; something that can be used to consistently reproduce the issue.

[zmike]

I have this same behavior in C. I'm using autocomplete-snippets package and my snippets do not work if autocomplete+ is enabled; it just uses a random symbol instead of the snippet.

I'm new to atom, so I don't know what other info I can provide.

EDIT: If I disable the 'show suggestions on keystroke' option then snippets work again, so I guess maybe this is not the right provider to use or something? Disabling the built-in provider has no effect, neither does changing from subsequence to symbol.

EDIT2: When keystroke suggestions are enabled, if I scroll all the way to the bottom of the suggestion list then I can see snippets there.

[Aerijo]

@saadq @zmike sorry, but until someone provides a way to consistently reproduce the error from scratch, nobody can help much. As I showed, I do not get the same behaviour when following the provided steps to reproduce.

A process that I can follow, that starts by opening Atom in safe mode, is what you need to provide. Right now, when I do the following steps, I get the same result I posted above

1. Open Atom in safe mode
2. In the snippets.cson file, delete everything and paste the following

'.source.js':
  'Console log':
    'prefix': 'cl'
    'body': 'console.log($1);'

3. Open a new blank file. It does not need to be saved.
4. Change the language to JavaScript
5. Paste the following text

var close = "close"

6. On a new line, type cl
7. Observe that the cl snippet is the first option, and pressing tab expands it as expected.

There are 101 things that can be happening with all the community packages you have installed. Using safe mode ensures that everybody is using (mostly) the same setup when trying to debug issues.

@zmike there is a little confusion between what the autocomplete-plus and snippets packages do (the lack of an explanation in the README.md on both doesn't help). I try to explain the difference here, but basically snippets work when you disable that autocomplete-plus option because snippets was always using tab to complete snippets, but autocomplete-plus was overriding it when the suggestions were shown.

[zmike]

I tried using my setup with safe mode enabled and snippet completion worked as expected. I then started up atom normally and reenabled my small number of community packages one by one until the issue was reproduced.

When I enabled the ide-cquery package, I began to get unpredictable results and snippets were no longer functional, so I've uninstalled that package and now everything is working well. Thanks for providing extra info which helped me to at least resolve the issue with my setup; I would expect that a similar package is causing the original issue as well.

This is a bit unrelated, but is there a way to have the keystroke tooltip only show items containing the typed string? As an example, if I type "abc" and I have a variable named "ABABAB_CDCDCD" then it will show this variable on the list when I would prefer that it only show something containing the string "abc".

[saadq]

Sorry for the late response. I will try to see if I can create a minimal, reproducible example, but I imagine my issue is similar to @zmike and the issue might just be coming from atom-ide-ui and ide-flowtype putting their autocomplete suggestions at the top.

[zmike]

@saadq I am also using atom-ide-ui, but it seems that by itself it does not cause this issue.

[saadq]

Yeah, I don't believe atom-ide-ui gives any autocompletions by itself, it needs to be paired with an ide-* package. But it may still be the cause of the issue. For example, the ide-* package feeds atom-ide-ui package the autocompletions and then atom-ide-ui feeds them to autocomplete-plus. I don't know if that's how it works or not, but just something to consider.

[saadq]

I am going to close this issue here as it isn't really a problem with autocomplete-plus itself. In this issue for ide-flowtype, one of the authors mentioned that they set the priority for autocomplete here.

A good idea might be to try to send a pull request or open an issue in the Atom snippets package and see if they would be interested in adding a configurable option that lets their priority always be the highest.