Converting from Eclipse PDT to Vim

Question

I truly love VIM - it's one of only a handful of applications I've every come across that make you feel warm and fuzzy inside. However, for PHP development, I still use PDT Eclipse although I would love to switch.

The reason I can't quite at the moment is the CTRL+SPACE code-assist functionality that I rely on so much - it's so useful, especially when type hinting, or using PHPDoc variable comment blocks.

I know there are cool plugins for VIM out there that can probably replicate this functionality and then some - but what are they?

Answer 1

Code assist it's a new feature of VIM 7 [Ctrl+x] [Ctrl+o] will auto complete your code or open a popup of options

More features of VIM 7 can be found in this blogpost

Btw, I too like vim, but the PDT (and other IDEs) has much more features than code assist that make me preffer them over it.

Answer 2

Vim has OmniCompletion built in, you should add this to your .vimrc:

filetype plugin on
au FileType php set omnifunc=phpcomplete#CompletePHP

In addition I recommend you this plugins:

• VTreeExplorer
• snippetsEmu

and also take a look to this article about php debugging in Vim, and this paper, it has many useful tips for using Vim in PHP Development.

Answer 3

Look at SuperTab for making tab-autocompletion in Vim a bit easier to use than the standard bindings. You may also want to look into ctags, if you're into code indexing. Google "php vim ctags" and you'll see plenty of articles describing how to set it up.

The official Vim Wiki has a PHP section with some good tips, like integrating the official PHP documentation.