Ambiguity with the Tab Key in Cursor

Feature Requests
21

Our goal with this is to try and always show our AI completions when you’d want them, so when you just want to Tab something forward, no completion should show (unless it’s tabbing for you!).

I’d have to confirm if we have a way of rebinding the Tab key for accepting completions, but the better solution on our end here would be to improve the AI completions, so it either doesn’t suggest anything, or suggests the correct indentation on your behalf!

FYI You should be able to hit escape on an AI completion to reject it, then Tab as normal, which may be enough to keep you going as we improve completions in the future!

If you have any bad AI completions, do drop them here and I’ll pass them to the team.

1 Like
22

Any bad completions? About 80% of the time on my current project, the AI suggests completions that are somewhere between useless and counterproductive. It’s really only helpful on the margins.

23

2250×937 124 KB


// ... existing keybindings ...
{
    "key": "ctrl+tab",
    "command": "acceptSelectedSuggestion",
    "when": "suggestWidgetVisible && textInputFocus"
},
{
    "key": "tab",
    "command": "-acceptSelectedSuggestion",
    "when": "suggestWidgetVisible && textInputFocus"
}
// ... existing keybindings ...

{
    "key": "ctrl+tab",
    "command": "editor.action.triggerSuggest",
    "when": "editorTextFocus && !suggestWidgetVisible"
}
24

Sorry, but this has absolutely nothing to do with whether the completions are “good” or “bad”.

You are expecting your users to constantly, thousands of times a day, stop what they are doing, break out of any flow state, read what random suggestion an AI may or may not even be making, and which may appear anywhere on the screen, before every time they press one of the most common keys in programming.

Are we being pranked? I’m so confused what’s going on here. Make the magic feature (which is truly cool and powerful!) re-bindable to any key using the existing key binding infrastructure, and you can do whatever you want with the feature. If you continue to force it on TAB, you will alienate a non-trivial chunk of your user base.

I have multiple subscriptions to Cursor. I advocate for Cursor. I want Cursor win. This is not the way.

25

I appreciate your feedback!

As I said, I’ll bring this up with the team to see if we can make this re-bindable. The goal here is to correctly predict if you want indentation in the first place and suggest it instead of you having to do it yourself.

I understand there’s probably no harm in giving users the choice here, so we will see what’s possible.

26

A couple of things here. First of all, tab key is a lot more nuanced than just indentation. Yes that is one of the crucial and necessary features of Tab, but Tab also allows you to accept the Intellisense recommendations, which are often more accurate than the AI completion. In specific, Intellisense can only recommend me options that actually exist, whereas the AI is hallucinating code all the time! Auto-imports are also a really great feature mapped to tab key that cursor has now hijacked. No I don’t need AI completions to predict what intellisense is going to do, or if I want to make the indentation or not. Let the tools work for us and give us a choice on how to do them. Don’t make the value judgement for us, we can decide that for ourselves. How could giving your users a choice possibly be harmful? The inverse of that statement is definitely true. I am seeing 5+ different threads on this issue, and there are multiple users considering the switch back to vscode + copilot (myself included). Please do not think of this as an optional feature request, but something your product needs to implement in order to retain users who already have this functionality in the competing (FREE) product, vscode.