OmniSharp-Vim and Completion Snippets
I'm really happy that I finally managed to get a long running PR for the omnisharp-vim plugin merged into master. I started work on it about 12 months ago but it took some time to get it merged and the pull request became stale and needed some attention. During those 12 months I had a lot of positive feedback from people that really wanted to get the functionality merged and I spent a lot of time using it every day. This post explains a bit about the functionality and how it works.
What does it do
As far as I know the first OmniSharp plugin to have this functionality was omnisharp-emacs, I was first made aware of it by @jasonimison. What the functionality does is use the concept of snippets to aid auto completion. Selecting a completion on a function that accepts arguments will cause a dynamic snippet to be expanded and in the case of vim place you in SELECT mode on the first argument to the function. At this point the functionality of the snippet engine takes over and you can jump to different arguments with ease. I think this is much easier to explain graphically.
I've included KeyCastr captures below. It's also worth pointing out I have C-j mapped to jump to the next snippet placeholder.
Dotted access
Constructor calls
Single function calls
Multiline dotted access
Nested snippet completion
Generics
Setup and compatibility
Completion snippets rely on UltiSnips, it is currently the only snippet engine supported. You can use regular UltiSnips snippets and expand generated completion snippets inside of them.
I have UltiSnips configured in my .vimrc as below:
let g:UltiSnipsListSnippets ="<c-tab>"
let g:UltiSnipsJumpForwardTrigger="<c-j>"
let g:UltiSnipsJumpBackwardTrigger="<c-b>"
Completion snippets work well with many completion engines in vim, I've done the majority of testing with neocomplete, supertab, and standard C-x C-o completion. They require a recent version of vim. You can check if your version is supported by running :echo has("patch-7.3-598"), it should output 1. This requirement is because we make use of the CompleteDone event.
Completion snippets are not enabled by default. To enable them the following should be included in your .vimrc.
" Enable snippet completion, requires completeopt-=preview
let g:OmniSharp_want_snippet=1
How it works
You can checkout the diff for the pull request if you are interested. Both omnisharp-server and omnisharp-roslyn have support to return a snippet template for completion data. With the above mentioned .vimrc configuration this data is requested from the server, when vim fires it's CompleteDone event then a regex is run against a combination of the completion data and the context of the current line, if the regex matches then the completion is a candidate for snippet expansion and the UltiSnips internals are invoked. The snippet is also cached in a dictionary, keyed by the calculated completion term.
function! OmniSharp#ExpandAutoCompleteSnippet()
if !g:OmniSharp_want_snippet
return
endif
if !exists("*UltiSnips#AddSnippetWithPriority")
echoerr "g:OmniSharp_want_snippet is enabled but this requires the UltiSnips plugin and it is not installed."
return
endif
let line = strpart(getline('.'), 0, col('.')-1)
let remove_whitespace_regex = '^\s*\(.\{-}\)\s*$'
let completion = matchstr(line, '.*\zs\s\W.\+(.*)')
let completion = substitute(completion, remove_whitespace_regex, '\1', '')
let should_expand_completion = len(completion) != 0
if should_expand_completion
let completion = split(completion, '\.')[-1]
let completion = split(completion, 'new ')[-1]
if has_key(s:omnisharp_last_completion_dictionary, completion)
let snippet = get(get(s:omnisharp_last_completion_dictionary, completion, ''), 'snip','')
if !has_key(s:generated_snippets, completion)
call UltiSnips#AddSnippetWithPriority(completion, snippet, completion, 'iw', 'cs', 1)
let s:generated_snippets[completion] = snippet
endif
call UltiSnips#CursorMoved()
call UltiSnips#ExpandSnippetOrJump()
endif
endif
endfunction
Summary
I've found the completion snippets to be a real improvement over the standard completion. It is relatively complicated (for my brain) to determine exactly when a snippet should be expanded and to make sure they work well for Generics, Lambdas, and nested snippets.
If you notice any issues then please raise them on GitHub.