Change hotkey for autocomplete selection

Question

In Eclipse, I find it pretty annoying that Enter is the hotkey that selects an item from the Content Assist/Autocomplete list. Especially in PyDev where there is no end-of-line semicolon, pressing enter for a new line will instead give me whatever is selected in the Autocomplete list.

Tab is a much better selection hotkey since I'm not likely to want a tab mid-line.

Any chance of changing this in Eclipse?

Using CDT, PDT, and PyDev, but interested in any solution related to Eclipse.

Answer 1

All key bindings in Eclipse are defined in Window -> Preferences -> General -> Keys. I don't think you can change what is used to select stuff from the autocomplete list, but you can use space to select and then Enter for new line.

Answer 2

The autocompletion selection key(s) is editor specific. For instance in Aptana Studio, you could define set of keys for proposal selection. See e.g. Preferences/Aptana Studio/Editors/JavaScript. Since PyDev shares some code with Aptana Studio, it has similar capabilities. See "Preferences/PyDev/Editor/Code Completion/Apply completion on *" checkboxes.

Speaking of the Tab key as a selector, it doesn't seem possible w/o extra coding since it has special meaning to focus into proposals window. For these who interested could find Tab handling at org.eclipse.jface.text.contentassist.CompletionProposalPopup.verifyKey(VerifyEvent)

Cheers, Max

Answer 3

Unfortunately it's not really possible to use tab instead of enter to auto-complete in PyDev (nor in Eclipse itself).

So, what I do in these cases is use Shift-Enter to go to a new line: note that in this case, you can press Shift+Enter from any place in your line and it'll mimic a 'go to end of line, press enter' (which is a nice thing for me).

Implementation note: as Max pointed out, the '\t' and '\r,'\n' cases are actually hard-coded in Eclipse at: org.eclipse.jface.text.contentassist.CompletionProposalPopup.verifyKey(VerifyEvent) so, to fix that, you'd need a patch which changed that at Eclipse itself (so, if you feel it's worthwhile, create a bug-request in Eclipse itself to ask for that feature).