I think the generic term for this feature is "code intelligence". Autocompletion often just means that the editor provides suggestions of other symbols in the same file, which is a far call from the language-aware and context-aware suggestions, auto imports and refactoring features IDEs provide.

The distinction seems important as I personally wouldn't go back from VSCode to an editor that merely provides autocompletion but can't reason about the language beyond basic syntax highlighting.

I caught myself using "Google" as a verb when talking about searching on Amazon the other day and "Xerox" has become synonymous with "copying" for an entire generation, so I wouldn't judge too harshly on people using "Intellisense" as a generic phrase even if it can harm communication ("But does this editor have Intellisense?").

GTAGS/CTAGS/"any other family of tag processors/generators" could be used for autocompletion in Emacs/Vim way before, and they were just "part" of autocompletion.

I'm ok with "code intelligence", or even more precisely "autocomplete based on code intelligence". All good. Just not "intellisense", please ;)

> I personally wouldn't go back from VSCode to an editor that merely provides autocompletion

Autocompletion can draw from multiple sources. By default, before LSP hooks have a chance to add themselseves to the list, I have following sources configured:

      '(ac-source-symbols
        ac-source-variables
        ac-source-functions
        ac-source-features
        ac-source-filename
        ac-source-abbrev
        ac-source-dictionary
        ac-source-words-in-same-mode-buffers
        ac-source-semantic
        ac-source-yasnippet
        ac-source-files-in-current-dir) 

Maybe that's why I don't think changing the name of the feature based on just the source it uses makes sense.

I always understood "intellisense" as a way to say "contextual autocompletion based on structured information". So it is a form of autocompletion, but one that adapts gracefully to the context (like an IDE autocompletion experience). Autocompletion could just mean that you have some string matching (more like basic shell completion).

It's good to have a way to specify when you're talking about the former meaning and I do not know another term for this than "intellisense".

+1 to this. A lot of basic text editors have basic string-based autocompletion. Intellisense is way more than that. IntelliJ (atleast PyCharm) excels at this too.

In my experience, "Intellisense" is shorthand for "broken autocompletion"

I don't use Microsoft IDEs often, but have had experience with them many times over the past 15 years. And every single time, intellisense would freeze, get confused, or just stop working completely. Not once in 15 years have I had a passable experience with it, so nowadays when I'm in Microsoft land I always immediately disable intellisense before I start working.

I completely understand your feelings. I also always faced quite a lot of issues with Visual Studio (not vscode) autocompletion when trying to write C++. But when it decides to work the experience is great.

Visual Studio Code on the other hand is just fantastic. I was a hardcore emacs user until I switched to VSCode as my main editor a few years ago due to the crazy good auto-completion experience.

I could’ve written this comment. I made myself use VSCode for about a week, and that was about the last time I seriously used Emacs.

I had the privilege of chatting with the VSCode booth people at PyCon a couple years ago. I was waxing enthusiastic about some feature or another and one of the other people at the booth spun around — “I wrote that!”, and then I got to tell him how much I loved his work. That felt great.

Intellisense is a collection of dozens of IDE features and is far more than just autocomplete

I think at this point it's safe to assume Intellisense is fairly genericized and refers more to an "autocompletion" that takes additional information/context into account than a specific $company's implementation.