The big feature that I want in an autocomplete is the ability to click on the text area and get a list of possible completions. I hacked that onto bootstraps angular autocomplete widget, but it's a bit of a mess.
I like this, but I feel that a list of all the potential completions instead of snapping to the nearest one would be very useful. Sometimes you remember part of the function you're after but not the enough of it to get the autocomplete to snap to the right thing. It could still snap to the nearest, but seeing a list of potential completions would be nice as well.
The closest we have now is datalist[1], which acts as a data source that you can attach to a text input to give it autocomplete. Unfortunately, it isn't nearly as fully-featured as it could be, possibly because no one uses it so there's no incentive to make it better (although Chrome's implementation has gotten markedly better over the past two years or so, mostly by fixing blatant bugs).
And it's scary how good it is for "autocomplete" sometimes. I've found it much more useful on our angular webside frontend rather than the c# backend.. but man on the angular/javascript side it really saves time.
I can't think of any good examples off the top of my head, but every few days I literally am wondering to myself "how did I now I wanted to do exactly that!"
If you want not use Angular or another other framework, a fully functional autocomplete may be made with 10 lines of JavaScript. See demo: http://www.scriptol.com/javascript/autocomplete.php
Adding a scrolling list of choices would requires two or three more lines.
I did my first autocomplete search UI with that library.
These days, due to the rest of the project, I've been using Angular and Material's Autocomplete component, which I've found very easy to customise for in-memory indexes or hits to a remote ElasticSearch 'suggester' proxy endpoint.
Angular Material's Autocomplete component is an example of this. Our users would have found that really helpful... if Chrome's autofill behavior didn't break it.
I was looking for a multiselect autocomplete component the other day. The only useful I found was from SemanticUI, and it's not quite configurable enough. I'll have to roll out my own...
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