Syntax hinting in Vim

Question

I've been using Vim for quite a while now, and while the code-completion (omni, dictionary, etc) works fine I've been missing one thing.

Syntax-hinting, so basically I'd like to know what arguments a function accepts, rather than look it up online I'd like to have it somewhere in Vim, preferably in a box above the current line or something.

Is there any way to achieve this, I mostly work with PHP, Python and C++ so I need it for those languages.

Edit: I do already have ctags installed, but from what I could tell it didn't provide syntax-hinting, tried it with PHP standard functions, dunno if I've overlooked something.

There's also the option of using snipMate and entering all standard library functions, but that's a lot of work, would've imagined that someone already did that (And yes there's something like ultiSnips that does but it's inferior to snipMate)

Answer 1

From the way it sounds I think you are looking for set completeopt+=preview. More information can be found at :help completeopt.

Answer 2

I think the plugin echofunc does that. When you are writing code, after you press ( the function prototype is displayed in the statusbar.

Check also the plugin srcexpl.vim which I think does something similar (I don't use it much though).