Drupal Autocomplete in Vim

Aug

2009

Submitted by Nick on Tue, 18th Aug 2009, 13:03 and has been commented on 4 times.

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!

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 :-)

4 Comments

The most recent comment was on Mon, 28th Dec 2009, 08:42

color me impressed

Aug

2009

Submitted by housetier (not verified) on Tue, 18th Aug 2009, 18:34.

This is very very cool!

Thank you so much! I exclusively use vim (because I just can't get around all those graphical IDEs) and this will help a lot!

Am I missing something?

Aug

2009

Submitted by winston (not verified) on Fri, 21st Aug 2009, 03:21.

Could a similar (perhaps better) result be achieved using exuberant CTags? As described in this presentation - http://zmievski.org/2007/02/vim-for-php-programmers-slides-and-resources.

Apologies if I'm missing something - still pretty new to Vim.

this is great. thanks for

Oct

2009

Submitted by Aaron Couch (not verified) on Mon, 12th Oct 2009, 14:19.

this is great. thanks for sharing.

is there a way to include the parameters of a function as well? for example the link function takes: l($text, $path, $options = array()).

obviously your script could be updated to include this, but is there a way to get it working with the vim dictionary? i tried this manually but inserting parameters for a function in the dictionary file and it didn't work. i'm new to vim so imagine that the dictionary is limited to the function name but don't know. i'll keep looking and post if i find anything. in the meantime any insight would be appreciated. thanks.