How does autocompletion in IDEs work?

Question

I've been wondering how autocompletion/suggestions in IDEs like Eclipse work, since I'm looking to implement a similar feature into my project. Do they typically use Databases to efficiently search for the suggestions? Is there anywhere I could read further on that as well? I've had a hard time finding anything on IDEs, most of my investigation lead me to search engines. Is it much different from that in IDEs or are similar approaches used?

Thanks ahead! Treiber

Take a look to http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7058724/how-to-create-an-efficient-auto-complete — Saulius Next, May 10 '17 at 15:38

score 0 · Answer 1 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:02

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The autocomplete feature also known as Intellisense is really helpful in coding. In short it look for matches each time you pressed a char in that context. This link is really helpful

edited May 23 '17 at 12:02

Community

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answered May 10 '17 at 15:47

Vishesh

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score 0 · Answer 2 · answered May 10 '17 at 16:26

http://www.realsolve.co.uk/site/tech/jface-text.php --- may help you

Ideally autocompleate hits storage system each key press for comparison. Storage might be a DB/File etc..

In Eclipse, there is a plug-in we have to add to get the autocomplete capability, The "Eclipse plug-in developer's guide" discusses how different things, including the internal model and auto completion works.

How does autocompletion in IDEs work?

2 Answers2