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In web browsers this is done in the address bar and in some textboxes on commonly used pages, such as the Google's search box. Autocomplete for web addresses is particularly convenient because the complete addresses are often quite long and difficult to type in correctly.
In email programs autocomplete is typically used to fill in the email addresses of the intended recipients. Generally, there are not that many email addresses to which a user would normally write letters, hence it is relatively easy to use autocomplete to select between them. In addition, often email addresses are relatively long, hence typing them in completely is not convenient.
Autcomplete of source code is also known as "code completion". In a source code editor autocomplete is greatly simplified by the regular structure of the programming languages. There are usually only a limited number of words meaningful in the current namespace, such as names of variables and functions. Autocomplete naturally comes in very handy. A particularly well-known and useful kind of autocomplete in source code editors is based on Microsoft's Intellisense design. It involves showing a popup list of possible completions for the currently input prefix to allow the user to choose the right one. This is particularly useful in object-oriented programming because often the programmer will not even known well enough what members a particular class has. Therefore, autocomplete and Intellisense then serve as a form of convenient documentation as well as an input method. Another beneficial feature of autocomplete for source code is that it encourages the programmers to use longer, more descriptive variable names incorporating both lower and upper case letters, hence making the source code more readable. Autocomplete allows to input such longer names without much extra effort, whereas typing them completely may be difficult and less accurate for many typists, especially in the case of mixed case words like numberOfWordsPerParagraph.
In an operating system shell, such as Unix's sh or bashThis article is about the UNIX shell named Bash. For information about the popular website with humorous quotes, see Bash. Bash is a UNIX command shell written for the GNU project. Its name is an acronym for B ourne a gain sh ell — a pun on the Bourne she or WindowsImage use policy. Microsoft Windows is a range of commercial operating environments for personal computers. The range was first introduced by Microsoft in 1985 and eventually has come to dominate the world personal computer market. All recent versions of's DOS, or in similar command driven interfaces autocomplete of command names and file names may be accomplished by keeping track of all the possible names of things the user may access. Here autocomplete is usually done by pressing Tab key after typing the first several letters of the word. For example, if the only file in the current directory that starts with x is xLongFileName, the user may prefer to type x and autocomplete to the complete name. If there were another file name or command starting with x in the same scope, usually the user would have to type some more letters to disambiguate what he or she means to the computer.