Drupal Autocomplete in Vim

Posted on 18 August 2009 in
vim programming Drupal

I recently stumbled across a handy tutorial on configuring a Drupal dictionary in Vim for autocomplete. I also remembered helping a friend out with a similar problem, Drupal syntax highlighting for Nano. I then combined the two and have a simple to follow tutorial for generating your own drupal 6 dictionary for vim autocomplete!

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Step 1… Create a dictionaries folder if you don't already have one…

mkdir -p ~/.vim/dictionaries/

Step 2… Generate your dictionary… Run the following from your Drupal install…

grep "^function" modules/ includes/ -hR | gawk '{ sub(/\(.+/, "(", $2); print $2 }' | sort -u > ~/.vim/dictionaries/drupal6.dict

This will search the modules and includes folders recursively for all lines starting with "function". Then, via some gawk and tr magic, we end up with a list of functions that will be dumped into our dictionary file!

Step 3… Configure Vim to add the new dictionary file on load up…

vim ~/.vimrc

then add…

set dict +=~/.vim/dictionaries/drupal6.dict

Step 4… There is no step 4. You're done!

When editing your code (in INSERT mode), press Ctrl+X and then Ctrl+K to invoke the auto-complete menu.

Brilliant :-)