This post is part of a series:

1. Vim to Emacs
2. Vim to Emacs - Ace Jump Mode
3. Vim to Emacs - YASnippets
4. Vim to Emacs - Smart Tab

The latest thing I’m missing from Vim is tab completion. I’d like to hit tab and have Emacs either insert a snippet or try to auto-complete the word based on what I just typed.

With lots of Googlizing I’ve managed to hack together a solution, it’s not perfect (yet) but still meets most of my needs for now.

Setup

Download smart-tab.el from genehack (or from me) and save it in to the .emacs.d/vendor folder.

Next create a tab.el in the .emacs/personal folder.

personal/tab.el

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(require 'smart-tab)
(require 'yasnippet)

(cons 'yas/hippie-try-expand 'hippie-expand-try-functions-list)

(setq smart-tab-using-hippie-expand t)
(global-smart-tab-mode t)

Here I am using cons to push YASnippets to the front of the hippie expand list, this means snippets are found before trying to auto-complete words.

As I said this is not perfect, I can’t auto-complete in the middle of a snippet process for instance but it’s not a bad start.