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I recently upgraded to Mathematica 9 and have noticed a slightly annoying behavior that I was looking to remedy. In the past I would type special characters, e.g. \[alpha], by typing Esc+a+Esc, with escape being shorthand for the \[AliasDelimiter] character. Unfortunately, if Mathematica's auto-complete popup has appeared (say for instance if you're typing in a few letters that match a common function name), escape is also the key that closes this popup. As a result, the initial alias delimiter character is never input! This really slows down typing significantly as I have to constantly backtrack and re-input special characters.

A very common scenario is when one is typing in an array name (which Mathematica tries to autocomplete) and then typing in the double-bracket Part characters \[LeftDoubleBracket] with Esc+[+[+Esc.

The only fix I can think of is to either disable auto-complete (which I do like enabled), or to type in special characters with a different hotkey (perhaps the backtick key, `). Another solution would be to disable escape as the hotkey that closes the autocomplete window. How have others dealt with this issue?

halirutan
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Guillochon
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    Depending on the speed of your typing, increasing the autocompletion popup delay may help... – MikeLimaOscar Oct 24 '13 at 16:12
  • I use AutoHotkey to overload some key that I do not use (say CapsLock) and I create a double keystroke shortcut that sends Esc+[[+Esc to Mathematica. – Hector Oct 24 '13 at 16:33
  • @MikeLimaOscar That sounds like an excellent solution, what is the option name? – Guillochon Oct 24 '13 at 17:07
  • Good question. The double-bracket thing is particularly annoying. – Simon Woods Oct 24 '13 at 20:19
  • My solution to this problem was to train myself to hit Esc twice in any situation where the autocomplete popup has appeared. – m_goldberg Oct 24 '13 at 21:21
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    @Guillochon The popup delay is found in Interface tab of the "proper" preferences dialog, where you enable or disable autocompletion. – MikeLimaOscar Oct 25 '13 at 09:12
  • @MikeLimaOscar Thanks, I guess I assumed an option like that would have been buried somewhere. A delay of about a half second seems to be a good balance. – Guillochon Oct 25 '13 at 16:21
  • related http://mathematica.stackexchange.com/questions/29776/predictive-interface-eats-my-esc-key – xslittlegrass Oct 29 '13 at 16:58

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