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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-18T12:07:01+00:00

I’ve come to a vim completion behavior that is very annoying for me and

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I’ve come to a vim completion behavior that is very annoying for me and I cannot figure out how to configure vim to behave differently.Maybe it is not possible at all.

Suppose I’m editing file with following content:

MyCompany2
MyCompanies
MyCompany3

Now I want to add another entry (say MyCompanyABC) so I type My and hit Ctrl-N, so now I have

MyCompany2

Now I hit backspace, then A so I’m at

MyCompanyA

No I decide to try completion again so I hit Ctrl-N and vim takes me back to

My

So is there a way to make it so that the last step keeps what I already have?

UPDATE:

I gave the completion sequence wrong. The problem I describe appears if one first hits Ctrl-P. Then in the above scenario you get and the rest as above.

MyCompany3

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    This doesn’t behave like this on my machine (Ubuntu 10.10, vim 7.2.330 here). If I do this:

    • Open vim by typing vi

    • Type the text you gave above

      MyCompany2
MyCompanies
MyCompany3

    • Open a new line below

    • Type “My”
    • Press Ctrl-N
    • Choose MyCompany2
    • Backspace (get “MyCompany” after that)
    • Type A (get “MyCompanyA”)

    Ctrl-N does nothing – as expected, status bar says: -- Keyword completition (^N^P) Pattern not found.

    Is it possible you have some plugin that is changing the default behavior? You can also try vi -u NONE to check whether you have something in your .vimrc that is changing this behavior. Best if you have some other system to check it out.

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