Practical Vim, 2nd Edition

Tip 116

Autocomplete Entire Lines

In all of the examples so far, we’ve looked at completing words, but Vim can also autocomplete entire lines.

Line-wise autocompletion is triggered by running <C-x><C-l> (see compl-whole-lineⓘ). Suppose that we started off with this snippet:

auto_complete/bg-colors.css

.top {
  background-color: #ef66ef; }
.bottom {

We want to duplicate the second line and place it at the end of the file. Here’s how this can be done using whole-line autocompletion:

Keystrokes	Buffer Contents
{start}	.top { background-color: #ef66ef; } .bottom {
oba	.top { background-color: #ef66ef; } .bottom { ba
<C-x><C-l><Esc>	.top { background-color: #ef66ef; } .bottom { background-color: #ef66ef; }

The same files ...