Practical Vim

Tip 111

Meet Vim’s Keyword Autocompletion

With keyword autocompletion, Vim attempts to guess the word that we’re typing, which can save us from completing it by hand.

Vim’s autocomplete functionality is triggered from Insert mode. When invoked, Vim builds a word list from the contents of each buffer in the current editing session and then examines the characters to the left of the cursor, looking for a partial word. If one is found, the word list is filtered to exclude anything that doesn’t begin with that partial word. The resulting word list is presented in a menu from which we can select our match.

This figure shows two screenshots, one taken before and one after triggering Vim’s keyword autocompletion:

In this case, the letter “s” ...