Autocompletion in Vim

259
votes

In a nutshell, I'm searching for a working autocompletion feature for the Vim editor. I've argued before that Vim completely replaces an IDE under Linux and while that's certainly true, it lacks one important feature: autocompletion.

I know about Ctrl+N, Exuberant Ctags integration, Taglist, cppcomplete and OmniCppComplete. Alas, none of these fits my description of “working autocompletion:”

  • Ctrl+N works nicely (only) if you've forgotton how to spell class, or while. Oh well.
  • Ctags gives you the rudiments but has a lot of drawbacks.
  • Taglist is just a Ctags wrapper and as such, inherits most of its drawbacks (although it works well for listing declarations).
  • cppcomplete simply doesn't work as promised, and I can't figure out what I did wrong, or if it's “working” correctly and the limitations are by design.
  • OmniCppComplete seems to have the same problems as cppcomplete, i.e. auto-completion doesn't work properly. Additionally, the tags file once again needs to be updated manually.

I'm aware of the fact that not even modern, full-blown IDEs offer good C++ code completion. That's why I've accepted Vim's lack in this area until now. But I think a fundamental level of code completion isn't too much to ask, and is in fact required for productive usage. So I'm searching for something that can accomplish at least the following things.

  • Syntax awareness. cppcomplete promises (but doesn't deliver for me), correct, scope-aware auto-completion of the following:

    variableName.abc
variableName->abc
typeName::abc

    And really, anything else is completely useless.

  • Configurability. I need to specify (easily) where the source files are, and hence where the script gets its auto-completion information from. In fact, I've got a Makefile in my directory which specifies the required include paths. Eclipse can interpret the information found therein, why not a Vim script as well?

  • Up-to-dateness. As soon as I change something in my file, I want the auto-completion to reflect this. I do not want to manually trigger ctags (or something comparable). Also, changes should be incremental, i.e. when I've changed just one file it's completely unacceptable for ctags to re-parse the whole directory tree (which may be huge).

Did I forget anything? Feel free to update.

I'm comfortable with quite a lot of configuration and/or tinkering but I don't want to program a solution from scratch, and I'm not good at debugging Vim scripts.

A final note, I'd really like something similar for Java and C# but I guess that's too much to hope for: ctags only parses code files and both Java and C# have huge, precompiled frameworks that would need to be indexed. Unfortunately, developing .NET without an IDE is even more of a PITA than C++.

7
c++vimideautocomplete
It's been a long time since you asked this question, have you finally found a good one? I am asking because I don't see any accepted answers. Personally though I have to admit I resorted into prefixing my variables/functions. For example, all of them start with sh (meaning it's in my library) and followed by the abbreviation of my class. For example shP for Parser class. Then all you need to do is write shP and hit CTRL+p (or CTRL+n if you want) and get the class members from last use to first (or first to last if CTRL+n) – Shahbaz
@Shahbaz In fact, I’m convinced that there is no good enough solution at the moment. clang_complete is technically the most sound but prohibitively slow due to lack of caching the results and partial compilation. I have to admit that I haven’t tried all answers because some require a convoluted, time-consuming setup. I’ll hold my breath for a usable plugin now that clang finally allows developers to build ASTs from C++ sources (until now, there were no good free parsers for C++ available). – Konrad Rudolph
Have you tried clang_complete recently? It can use libclang with caching now and thus should be faster. – Jan Larres
@Jan Thanks for the info. When I last tried it, libclang support was still sketchy. I should probably try again once I get the time. – Konrad Rudolph
(Reason for edit rollback: product names aren’t code, they don’t belong formatted like this.) – Konrad Rudolph

7 Answers

173
votes

Try YouCompleteMe. It uses Clang through the libclang interface, offering semantic C/C++/Objective-C completion. It's much like clang_complete, but substantially faster and with fuzzy-matching.

In addition to the above, YCM also provides semantic completion for C#, Python, Go, TypeScript etc. It also provides non-semantic, identifier-based completion for languages for which it doesn't have semantic support.

36
votes

There’s also clang_complete which uses the clang compiler to provide code completion for C++ projects. There’s another question with troubleshooting hints for this plugin.

The plugin seems to work fairly well as long as the project compiles, but is prohibitively slow for large projects (since it attempts a full compilation to generate the tags list).

7
votes

as per requested, here is the comment I gave earlier:

have a look at this:

this link should help you if you want to use monodevelop on a MacOSX

Good luck and happy coding.

6
votes

I've just found the project Eclim linked in another question. This looks quite promising, at least for Java integration.

3
votes

I'm a bit late to the party but autocomplpop might be helpful.

2
votes

is what you are looking for something like intellisense?

insevim seems to address the issue.

link to screenshots here

1
votes

Did someone mention code_complete?

But you did not like ctags, so this is probably not what you are looking for...