Updated on April 21, 2020 in #dev-environment, #vim

Using Vim's Built in Complete Menu for Autocompleting Words

In this video we'll use Vim's complete menu to get a natural autocomplete experience without having to set up a language server.

One of my favorite features of Sublime Text was having an autocomplete menu pop up to help complete words that were previously written in the current file or files that I had open.

We’re going to go over how to get that set up in Vim. We’ll be using 1 very light weight plugin to get the menu to pop up automatically but everything else is already built into Vim.

The cool thing about this set up is that you don’t need to use any language servers which means it will work while working with any file type. This is very handy for programming, but also writing too. Especially when combined with Vim snippets.

# Using and Configuring Vim’s Complete Menu

Timestamped Table of Contents

• 2:49 – Configuring your vimrc file to use the complete menu
• 2:59 – Having the menu popup automatically with the AutoComplPop plugin
• 3:48 – Configuring the complete setting to use dictionary words with spell check
• 5:17 – Configuring completeopt to naturally allow you to autocomplete items
• 7:56 – Setting shortmess to not show keyword completion messages in the status bar
• 9:03 – Configuring key mappings to make it easy to navigate, select and cancel items
• 12:32 – Everything we talked about is in my dotfiles repo on GitHub

Reference Links

• https://github.com/vim-scripts/AutoComplPop
• https://github.com/nickjj/dotfiles

How do you have your Vim complete menu configured? Let me know below.