Practical Vim

Chapter 19Dial X for Autocompletion

Autocompletion saves us from typing out entire words. Given the first letters of a word, Vim builds a list of suggested endings and lets us choose our favorite. Whether or not this is of any use to us depends on how adept we are at interacting with that list of suggestions. We’ll learn a few tricks for working with the autocomplete menu in Tip 112.

Tip 111, introduces the basics of keyword autocompletion. The list of suggested completions is created by scanning all files that have been opened in the current editing session, as well as any included files and tag files. We’ll find out what this means in Tip 113, and see how we can narrow down the list of suggestions.

Besides keywords, Vim has other ways ...