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Wildcard commands aren't auto-completing #153
Description
In the PowerShell ISE, I frequently type partial command names, containing wildcards. For example, to find the command New-AzureRmVirtualNetworkSubnetConfig, I might type *subnet* and hit CTRL + SPACE to invoke Intellisense.
Unfortunately, this isn't currently working in the Visual Studio Code PowerShell Extension.
Here's a screenshot showing it working in PowerShell ISE. Forgive the fading-out Intellisense, due to some issue with screen capture in SnagIt.
Cheers,
Trevor Sullivan
https://trevorsullivan.net
https://twitter.com/pcgeek86
Reacted by Justin Grote
Activity
daviwil commentedon Apr 25, 2016
I'll bet that this is an issue on VS Code's side. They add some extra "intelligence" when it comes to gathering completions at the cursor location so they might be throwing out the results that come back from the language server in this case. I'll look into it!
daviwil commentedon May 11, 2016
Moving to 0.7.0, definitely looks like an issue on VS Code's side. I see that IntelliSense results are coming back for wildcard completions but they aren't being displayed. Will file a bug at their repo to track this.
pcgeek86 commentedon May 11, 2016
David Wilson (@daviwil) Thanks for discovering the root cause! Hoping they can fix this soon.
pcgeek86 commentedon Jan 30, 2017
David Wilson (@daviwil) Any update on this? I'm still encountering this bug. Thanks!
daviwil commentedon Jan 30, 2017
Nah, too many other high priority issues recently. I'll assign it to the next feature update in case we get a chance to look into it.
38 remaining items
SydneyhSmith commentedon Apr 21, 2020
Yep, we need to implement this but unfortunately the platform doesnt give us a good mechanism yet.
MartinGC94 commentedon Jun 24, 2025
It's been 5 years. Has the platform gotten better so this can be added?
JustinGrote commentedon Jun 30, 2025
MartinGC94 Since it works at the PS command line, we can probably get this to work via the completion API
MartinGC94 commentedon Jun 30, 2025
Yes. From what I understood of the issue mentioned earlier the LSP is getting the correct results, they just aren't shown in the VS code GUI because of the filter text or something. So my understanding is that either VS code has to make some changes, or the extension has to work around the limitations.
JustinGrote commentedon Jun 30, 2025
OK, yeah I was reminded now why this doesn't work. The LSP returns the info fine, but vscode has built-in logic that auto-filters anything that doesn't begin with the typed text, I assume so that the highlighting stuff works correctly and not need to put in a bunch of edge-case things there.
In order to fix this AFAIK, we'd have to implement our own completion provider and all the scaffolding required to do that, per microsoft/vscode#92433.
Do we have any examples of this "working" in other languages like python/etc.? If so I can delve their codebase to see how they fixed/worked around it and maybe find a clever solution there.
JustinGrote commentedon Jul 1, 2025
I delved some more and found the filter code in vscode itself, if I get some time I may attempt a fix PR, but yeah, I wouldn't expect this anytime soon. I don't think it happens with other editors (vim, etc.) though.
Also switching type to Feature/Enhancement from bug since this is technically not a bug, just something ISE does that vscode doesn't.