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Published 20 hours ago • verified publisher icon cline

Multiple issues with autocompletion for file search

Open alexn-tinwell opened this issue 5 months ago • 1 comments

What happened?

There are two main problems with the autocompletion functionality:

  1. Unintuitive CamelHump Search Order: When using CamelHump search for files (e.g., typing "MCF" for "MyCodeFile"), the results are sorted alphabetically instead of by relevance. For instance, with files /a/MyCodeFileTests.cs and /z/MyCodeFile.ts, the former is listed first, even though "MCF" is a better match for the latter. The expected behavior is for the most relevant matches to appear at the top, similar to search features in VS Code or JetBrains IDEs.
  2. No Autocomplete in Edit Mode: When editing a previously sent chat message, the autocomplete dropdown does not trigger when typing @ or /. This prevents embedding files or running commands while editing.

Steps to reproduce

For the search order issue:

  1. Create a project containing files with paths like /a/MyCodeFileTests.cs and /z/MyCodeFile.ts.
  2. In the Cline chatbox, type @ to start a file search.
  3. Type MCF.
  4. Observe that /a/MyCodeFileTests.cs appears before /z/MyCodeFile.ts in the results.

For the missing autocomplete in edit mode issue:

  1. Send any message in the chat.
  2. Begin editing that message.
  3. Type @ or /.
  4. Observe that no autocomplete suggestions appear.

Relevant API REQUEST output

N/A

Provider/Model

gemini / gemini-2.5-pro

Operating System

darwin 24.4.0

System Info

VSCode: 1.101.1, Node.js: v22.15.1, Architecture: arm64

Cline Version

3.17.15

Additional context

N/A

alexn-tinwell avatar Jun 24 '25 20:06 alexn-tinwell

Thanks for the suggestions @alexn-tinwell , I'll bring it up to the team

kevinneung avatar Jun 25 '25 17:06 kevinneung

Thanks @alexn-tinwell it would be very helpful if you created a feature request for this idea here: https://github.com/cline/cline/discussions/categories/feature-requests

saoudrizwan avatar Jul 26 '25 13:07 saoudrizwan

I'm not sure how this is a feature request. What I've outlined are bugs:

problems with the autocompletion

I've attached an example of Cline's odd behaviour: typing all-lowercase entries of a filename (the full name being /changes_diff.txt) results in wildly different results with each keypress - it's not determinstic whatsoever

https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/b4f18e09-a751-4bc5-92b3-676a0e775842

Compare that to Visual Studio Code

https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/135ee675-3a9f-41d0-b55c-32262a7a6514

@saoudrizwan @kevinneung

alexn-tinwell avatar Aug 01 '25 23:08 alexn-tinwell

Ping

alexn-tinwell avatar Aug 25 '25 00:08 alexn-tinwell