This is part of the series on SLIME functions. See the introduction for information on what SLIME is.
Today I want to address auto-completion. There are many different Emacs extensions for doing completions, but the basic functionality in SLIME is provided by the function slime-complete-symbol, which takes the symbol under the cursor and expands it, using whatever symbols are reachable at that point in the code1]. The way I have it set up is a bit tricky, though, so here’s how it works:
I really prefer expansions to be bound to the TAB key. But the TAB key is also used to indent code. It’s possible to have it “do what I mean”, and the easiest method I found for that is to use Smart Tabs (see also the github repo).
Smart tab determines the expansion function to use based on the major mode of the current buffer*. So I’ve got the following in my configuration:
(require 'smart-tab) ;; make sure smart-tab.el is reachable in your load-path first
(global-smart-tab-mode 1) ;; switch on smart-tab everywhere
(setq smart-tab-completion-functions-alist
'((emacs-lisp-mode . lisp-complete-symbol)
(text-mode . dabbrev-completion) ;; this is the "default" emacs expansion function
(clojure-mode . slime-complete-symbol))) ;; see update below
Now, whenever I press TAB and the cursor is at the end of a symbol, it gets expanded. If I press TAB on any other place, that indents that line.
There’s a lot of stuff you can customize with expansions and auto completion, but this will give you the basics quickly and without too much hassle.
1] For Clojure code, at least, this boils down to; every symbol that is defined (or imported etc) in the current name space. This has two consequences:
- It only applies to code that has already been loaded into the program, so you will want to compile stuff pretty much immediately once you’ve written or modified it.
- It does not expand let bindings or function arguments, since those are lexically scoped and cannot be retrieved from the name space. There is probably a way to fix this, but I haven’t looked into the problem that far.
* Update: the smart tab configuration must be keyed off the MAJOR mode. So slime-mode . slime-complete-symbol will not work, since slime-mode isn’t a major mode. I replaced it here with clojure-mode.