Type ahead autocompletion in Eclipse

Question

Do Eclipse have a plugin for type ahead autocompletion like Visual Studio, so I don\'t have to destroy my spacebar by pressing Ctrl+Space all the time? (If

Answer 1

Completion is triggered when pressing ".", if that is what you are referring to as "type-ahead autocompletion". This is what Visual Studio also does, unless you are referring to another Visual Studio feature I'm unaware of.

Limiting completion to only imported packages I think is a somewhat unorthodox thing to do; you are forced to rely on wildcard imports to define the set of types to complete on. I think most users would consider that less than useful. You're welcome to elaborate on your use case for this, though. For example, why would you want to exclude all Java classes from completion?

BTW, using "type filters" (as VonC suggests) doesn't require you to add every single class. I typically (globally) exclude java.awt.*, sun.com.*, org.omd.*, and a few others. Eclipse also sorts completion according to a (type-sensitive) heuristic which usually results in the most relevant types being displayed at the top. For example, auto-completion inside a method call will put the variables which matches the method type signature at the top.