Omnicompletion stops giving useful predictions

Question

I am trying to set up omni completion for PHP in vim 7.3 with ctags 5.9~svn20110310 on Ubuntu 12.04.1 (LTS) but I am running into a very strange issue where completion provides radically different predictions for instances of the same class.

I have the following two files:

// Foo.php
class Foo {
        public function do_stuff() {
                echo 'Working...';
        }
}

// index.php
require 'Foo.php';
$f = new Foo();
$f->[cursor position 1]

$g = new Foo();
$g->[cursor position 2]

When the cursor is in position 1 and I press CTRL+X CTRL+O it comples the line with do_stuff( as we would expect. But when I press CTRL+X CTRL+O in the second position I get a list of predictions that starts with key, next, rewind. What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

Edit: With regard to your specific issue, if you have an old version of phpcomplete.vim, it's possible that you can only properly complete off a variable either by marking it with a special phpdoc tag (see this question) or by regenerating your tags file after declaring the variable.

In all probability, you are doing nothing wrong; the PHP support in ctags is extremely basic and not very rigorous, which unfortunately means the Vim support is lacking, too. A quick look at the ctags module illustrates the problem:

ctags/php.c

That's it. Just a couple of relatively basic regular expressions. That parser stuff at the bottom is not used any longer, and tragically hasn't been for a very long time.

Compounding the issue is the fact that the standard omnicomplete function for PHP in Vim is hackish at best; suffice it to say that it involves switching between all the open windows as part of its completion process (a practise explicitly condemned by Vim documentation). Take a look for yourself:

phpcomplete.vim/autoload/phpcomplete.vim

I have struggled with terrible PHP completion in Vim for a long time now and have determined that nothing short of a complete overhaul will produce a satisfactory result. I've joined the ctags dev mailing list, and I plan to improve the PHP support there before moving on to making Vim's omnicompletion thereof work as properly as it can in an interpreted language. For now, unfortunately, the solution is to wait until the support is better, or fix it yourself.