Auto completion

[janniscx]

Because micro already provides features like true color support, I wonder why there is not even an automatic completition for brackets and statements like def in python in ruby.
Is this feature not implemented yet or do I experience a bug? Unfortunately I can't code in go.

Thanks!

[zyedidia]

Unfortunately this feature is not implemented yet, although I plan to do it at some point. I think auto closing brackets, quotes, parentheses etc... is different from autocompletion for actual code keywords (and far easier to implement so that will probably get done first).

I think it would be best to have an autocompletion core in micro, and implement specific completion for each language in plugins. Micro can't magically know that def is a Python statement, and instead can use a code completion engine built for Python, such as Jedi. Of course, not all languages have something like Jedi to do auto completion, so in that case micro can just fall back to simple buffer completion (where it will auto complete any word that is already used in the current file).

Anyway, I'll try to implement auto complete for brackets soon, and I'll do more advanced auto completion some time in the future, but that's a lot more complex.

[janniscx]

I totally agree, the benefit of code keywords and whole API catalogs is also smaller.

But let me explain the following example for a method definition in ruby:

def mymethod(myparam)
  # some action
end

If the user types in an usual bracket, a closed one will be added after the cursor. In the above example, \n \nend would do the same trick after the user types def. This can also be limited to ruby because micro already recognizes the language as I saw.
So the most important language features might still be in the scope, we just need a few contributers to collect those patterns.

I appreciate your effort.

[CamilleScholtz]

IMO it would be best if something like this get handled very similar to how syntax highlighting is done. So just simple files with regex patterns, and some pre-defined actions, like "Add X character(s) on the next line" or "Add X character(s) after the cursor".

[zyedidia]

Yeah, I think what you're looking for here is snippets, and luckily, Vim users have already collected all those patterns. We just need a way of reading the snippet files and then of course actually implementing the snippet functionality. See here for lots of snippets that are already made. Those files are for the Vim plugin snipmate, but there are more complex ones in that repository for the Vim plugin UltiSnips. Those snippets are more complex but also more powerful, so we'll have to decide which one to use.

Anyway, I think this is a separate issue from snippets, although maybe snippets is what you meant originally. In any case, I think autocomplete and snippets are both features that would be great to have in micro and will hopefully get implemented at some point soon.

[janniscx]

Thanks for the new autoclose feature, it works very well.

The vim snippets look quite hard to read/parse, for example this one:

class ${1:`substitute(vim_snippets#Filename(), '\(_\|^\)\(.\)', '\u\2', 'g')`}
        ${0}
end

They also seem to cover many languages completely which I simply did not want to request here, originally I just thought of brackets and the most basic snippets.
But of course I'd be very happy about a very powerful snippet completition in the future, you can close this issue of course if you want to.

[ipstone]

Just as a reference for autocomplete function implemented in vim, there's one utilizing lua that is also popular: https://github.com/shougo/neocomplete.vim (I recall saw this or something similar before, using lua for auto-completion functionality in vim).

[niieani]

It would be great if there was autocompletion not only for languages, but also for commands available - would make Micro even more intuitive as you'd discover commands by typing them!

[zyedidia]

There is in fact autocompletion for commands. Maybe I should say that somewhere in the docs though... Just press tab and it should give you a list of suggestions in the statusline. It will also autocomplete filenames, and options when appropriate.

[niieani]

Aah. I guess I was expecting autocompletion like the one fish does. It will show the first autocompletion match as faded colors like this:

And then you can "scroll" up and down with the arrow keys to see different matches. To accept the suggestion you can press right arrow - pretty intuitive.

[mikamiel]

As for VS Code - it uses an open JSON-based Language Server Protocol for things like syntax highlighting and code completion. I don't know how hard would it be to implement support for this protocol in micro, but IMO it's a very promising solution:
https://code.visualstudio.com/blogs/2016/06/27/common-language-protocol