Vim-style keys to navigate up and down in Omnicomplete box

Question

One of the reasons that I moved from emacs to vim was to avoid awkward keybindings such as Ctrl+N and Ctrl+P for up and down. I would prefer more ergonomic keys like hjkl. However, I didn't find a way to navigate in Omnicomplete box without using arrow keys or Ctrl+N/P.

Does vim provide other keys for up and down?

Answer 1

In the insert mode completion popup, any printable character is used to further restrict the list of matches, so there are only the <C-N> / <C-P> keys to choose different menu items.

If you can live with losing some completion keys, you can define the following mappings:

:inoremap <expr> j pumvisible() ? '<C-n>' : 'j'
:inoremap <expr> k pumvisible() ? '<C-p>' : 'k'

Answer 2

I have the following mappings, which I'm very happy with:

" Move up and down in autocomplete with <c-j> and <c-k>
inoremap <expr> <c-j> ("\<C-n>")
inoremap <expr> <c-k> ("\<C-p>")

This is especially useful if you're using a plugin (such as Neocomplete, its older sibling Neocomplcache, or YouCompleteMe) that pops up autocomplete dialogues as soon as there might be something to complete to.