"Finish Him completes them all!"

Once again extending JEdit’s feature set. This time word completion. JEdit already has two word completion mechanisms: built-in one and TextAutocomplete plugin. However none of them provides as smooth completion as Netbeans or Textmate’s ones. First I was thinking about creating some BeanShell macro too improve my completion experience but it looked like to much logic for just a macro. So I ended up with new plugin, and this time written in… Scala (finally an opportunity to start learning Scala on real project).

It’s called “Finish Him!” and following comparison shows how it’s different from existing solutions for JEdit.

JEdit’s built in word completion:

• shows popup when triggered (-1)
• doesn’t sort suggestions by distance from the caret (-1)
• searches for suggestions in other (visible) buffers (+1)
  Total: -1

TextAutocomplete:

• shows popup automatically (-1)
• doesn’t sort suggestions by distance from the caret (-1)
• doesn’t search for suggestions in other (visible) buffers (-1)
  Total: -3

Finish Him!:

• doesn’t show popup when triggered, just inserts next suggestion (+1)
• sorts suggestions by distance from the caret (+1)
• searches for suggestions in other visible buffers (+1)
  Total: 3

Finish Him! kills other solutions with score of 3. I know that these things may look like details but after using Netbeans word completion you know that it’s the simplest, fastest and most “correct” (by proper suggestions sorting) word completion. If you’re using JEdit then check it out, it’s now available on Plugin Central so it can be installed directly from JEdit’s plugin manager. For sources look here.