Efficient autocompletion from very large word lists in Notepad++

Scintilla, the editing component powering Notepad++, uses an autocompletion algorithm that does not scale well to very large predefined lists of words. This is a problem if, for example, you want to autocomplete any word from the Merriam-Webster English Dictionary, which contains tens of thousands of words.

This plugin uses the trie data structure and a case-insensitive trie variant to store large numbers of words in a way that is amenable to autocompletion, albeit rather memory-intensive.

In addition, you can define different autocompletion lists for different file types. To get you started, a list of autocompletions for the PythonScript plugin is included in this repository.

Installation

1. Download version 3 or higher of the PythonScript plugin.
2. Download the code of this repo.
3. Unzip the downloaded code into a folder named dictautocomp.
4. Drop the new dictautocomp folder in %Appdata%\Roaming\Notepad++\plugins\config\PythonScript\scripts
5. Go to Plugins->Python Script->Configuration... from the main menu, find dictautocomp\dictautocomp.py from the list as shown in the below image, select User Scripts, and click the leftmost Add button.
6. At this point dictautocomp will be on the short list of PythonScript scripts, and if desired you can add a keyboard shortcut from Macro->Modify Shortcut/Delete Macro... from the main menu, as shown in the below image. NOTE: you will need to restart Notepad++ for dictautocomp to appear on this list.

Using Dictionary Autocompletion

1. Run Plugins->Python Script->dictautocomp
2. It will pop up a dialog showing you the current configuration; you can hit OK here
3. It will pop up a second dialog: if you want to add a new dictionary or remove a dictionary in the current config, fill out the form and hit OK; otherwise, hit Cancel to not add another dictionary
4. If you are in a file whose extension that matches the "extensions" field from either the "current configuration" from step 2 or the new dictionary configuration you added in step 3, then as you type, the auto-completion will include the words from the dictionary
5. This auto-completion will continue until you exit Notepad++. The next time you run the application, you will have to run this script again.