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Write · What words? · it guesses

Element 84

84◑‹
Ce
Complete

It proposes your next words. Keep typing, or take them.

autocomplete · ghost text · predictive keyboard

The other half of the exchange is Accept.

First known

Opened

1971TENEX: type the start of a command or file name, press ESC, and the EXEC fills in the rest. BBN.

See also: Reactive Keyboard (Darragh, Witten, James, U. Calgary, Nov 1989): 'predicting what the user is going to type next' and offering a menu.

“An ESC after any initial substring of a command or argument (such as a file name) invokes completion.”

TENEX fills in only when you press ESC, and rings the bell if the prefix is ambiguous; it does not offer words unasked.

Someone opened the dated document itself. The source.

  • ReadingValue

Specimen № 84 — operate freely

Type a reply. Tab takes its proposal, → takes one word.

Fig. 84 — Complete

000 readings · idle

Anatomy of Complete

  1. 01Type
    You
    Types.
    It
    Reads the start, and predicts the rest.
  2. 02Propose
    You
    Sees the proposal in grey.
    It
    Shows it beside the caret without putting it in.
  3. 03Take
    You
    Presses Tab, or takes one word.
    It
    Inserts it as though it had been typed.
  4. 04Or ignore
    You
    Keeps typing.
    It
    Drops the proposal, and guesses again.

Phases light as the specimen above registers them. The dark ones are the ones it can't sense.

Lineage

Phone keypads guessed words from ambiguous keypresses with T9 in the late 1990s. Gmail's Smart Compose (2018) proposed the rest of a sentence in grey, and code editors' ghost text followed with GitHub Copilot in 2021.

Descends from
Complete
Gave rise to

Under delegation

Mutates

  1. Survives
  2. Mutates
  3. Dissolves

Completion began as a way to type faster what you already meant. Once it proposes whole sentences, every Tab is a small delegation, and the text drifts toward what anyone would most likely say. The open question is how to keep authorship visible once it's mixed.

Becomes

Down the Write column

  1. it followsTType
  2. it targetsFiFill in
  3. it remembersAtAnnotate
  4. it connectsMMessage
  5. it guessesCeComplete
  6. it actsDtDraft

Read down and Type gets heavier: each step is the same act, on a machine that keeps track of more.

Bodies

The act stays put while the hardware changes. These are some of the forms Complete takes.

  • autocomplete
  • ghost text
  • predictive keyboard

From the 2021 table

This was a tile of its own. On this table it is a form of Complete, and its old address lands here.

  • Autocomplete InlineRenamedThe same act, under a name that says what it does.