An API for other Packages to use this.

[JAStanton]

It would be great if there was an API on this package that would allow me to spin up an instance of the AutoComplete whenever / wherever I wanted.

[JAStanton]

Or allow us to extend it by doing something like

{Autocomplete} = require 'atom'

which doesn't seem to work

[kevinsawicki]

So for your use case, you want to just open the autocomplete view in the current editor populated with a list of words that your package would be providing?

[JAStanton]

Correct. And I would want callbacks for selected item, that kind of thing.

[JAStanton]

A discussion on the matter: http://discuss.atom.io/t/depending-on-other-packages/2360/4

[kevinsawicki]

Okay, so would you still want the default behavior where the selected word is inserted into the editor or do you want to take that over in your package and do something custom when a word is selected?

[JAStanton]

Probably not. if inside a doc block you type @ I want it to trigger a list. if you select @author it should insert a snippet '@author ${1:[author]}' whereby when you press tab it will select the first argument. That kind of thing.

I already have the author snippet in my snippets:

  'author':
    'prefix': 'author'
    'body': '@author ${1:[author]}'

[amccloud]

@JAStanton since you're providing the items is https://atom.io/docs/api/v0.64.0/api/classes/SelectListView.html suited for your needs?

[JAStanton]

@amccloud it almost does but there is a lot of logic inside of AutocompleteView that I would be straight up copying and pasting.
everything in handleEvents, buildWordList (though I would supply my own data source), the setPosition, attach, I mean almost everything looks like what I need I think

[JAStanton]

I ended up just copying the source of autocomplete class over to my package.

[mattapperson]

+100000 on this

[saschagehlich]

I updated my package autocomplete-plus to support third-party suggestion providers. I also added an tutorial on how to create a provider:

https://github.com/saschagehlich/autocomplete-plus/wiki/Tutorial:-Registering-and-creating-a-suggestion-provider

I hope that something like this finds its way into the original autocomplete plugin some day. :)

[joefitzgerald]

@saschagehlich I think we should definitely upstream the Provider API you guys defined. I'm going to spend some time this weekend putting a PR together against this repo to achieve that.

[joefitzgerald]

Extended discussion here: https://discuss.atom.io/t/what-can-we-do-to-improve-autocomplete/13001

[kevinsawicki]

This package is deprecated and no longer shipped with Atom. If this is still an issue using the autocomplete-plus package, please open up a new issue on that repository, thanks.