BBAutoComplete
When I started moving my programming workflow over from the stone tools Emacs+GCC approach I’d been used to for so long to something more Mac-like, I got pretty comfortable with TextWrangler and BBEdit, but I kept occasionally going back to Emacs specifically for dabbrev-complete mode.
It’s one of those tools that you just can’t do without once you get used to it — autocompleting arbitrary text and magically getting the completion suggestions right is pretty handy and great even if your codebase doesn’t have the addiction to super-long identifier names that my current employer does.
I sure wish I’d known about BBAutoComplete a long time ago. It’s almost exactly dabbrev for scriptable Mac applications like TW and BBEdit, and it’s free.
February 27th, 2006 at 4:58 pm
Also, option-escape and F5 will auto-complete in any Cocoa text view or field. The spelling dictionary and the current contents of the text container you’re working with are where it gets its suggestions from.