Practical Vim, 2nd Edition

Tip 32

Tab-Complete Your Ex Commands

Just like in the shell, we can use the <Tab> key to autocomplete commands at the prompt.

Vim is smart about picking suggestions for tab-completion. It looks at the context of what has already been typed at the command line and builds a list of suitable suggestions. For example, we could type this:

:col<C-d>
colder        colorscheme

The <C-d> command asks Vim to reveal a list of possible completions (see c_CTRL-Dⓘ). If we hit the <Tab> key, the prompt will cycle through colder, colorscheme, and then the original col again. We can scroll backward through the suggestions by pressing <S-Tab>.

Suppose we want to change the color scheme, but we can’t remember the name of the theme we want. We could use ...