Practical Vim, 2nd Edition

Tip 119

Autocomplete with Context Awareness

Omni-completion is Vim’s answer to intellisense. It provides a list of suggestions that’s tailored for the context of the cursor position. In this tip, we’ll look at how it works in the context of a CSS file.

Omni-completion is triggered with the <C-x><C-o> command (see compl-omniⓘ). The functionality is implemented as a file-type plugin, so to activate it we have to source these lines of configuration:

essential.vim

set nocompatible
filetype plugin on

We also have to install a plugin that implements omni-completion for the language that we’re working with. Vim ships with support for about a dozen languages, including HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, and SQL. You can find the full list by looking ...