Question

I am seeking a plugin to do autocompletion popup for c++ development in emacs. what I have tried are Cedet Semantics and the Autocompletion mode, they are pretty neat in terms of completing the variable and function names as long as I have a few words already. For example, I have a class named foo and a function that returns an integer 1

class foo{
   int getInt(){return 1};
};

In the main method, so long as I started typing this

int main(){
 foo bar;
 bar.get...
}

the plugins have no problem popping up suggestions like bar.getInt(). However, what I am really looking for is something like in Eclipse, as soon as I press the “dot”, possible choices could be generated for me. Is that possible in Emacs? Thanks

Answer 1

It depends on your settings of auto-complete & CEDET. It looks like that auto-complete is setup to show possible completions only after several characters will be typed. You can check value of the ac-auto-start variable – if this is a number, then auto-complete will be called after this number of characters.
Another important thing is a what is in your ac-sources variable – for work with CEDET you need to use ac-source-semantic-raw or ac-source-semantic completion source.
To automatic completion after . or -> you can try to use Semantic’s built-in completion with something like:

(defun my-c-mode-cedet-hook ()
 (local-set-key "." 'semantic-complete-self-insert)
 (local-set-key ">" 'semantic-complete-self-insert))
(add-hook 'c-mode-common-hook 'my-c-mode-cedet-hook)

P.S. Had you seen my article on CEDET & C++?