Add more useful information in autocompletion results

[xulongwu4]

Ale is a great vim plugin and I have been happily using it for a while. I am experimenting with its code completion functionality recently. One thing I notice is that the popup menu for C-family languages does not have the function signature. The attachment is the result of code completion in a cpp file using Ale's omnifunc and clangd as the linter:

While I can see the type of the completed keyword, I don't have any information about the function argument list. I also tried vim-lsp with clangd and the result is shown below.

As can be seen, vim-lsp provides the user with the complete function prototype which could be extremely useful for complicated functions. I am wondering if the same thing can be implemented in ale. If it is already part of ale, can you elaborate a bit how to enable it?

[w0rp]

That's something that can be improved upon later.

[hfont]

I came across this also when testing ale, function autocomplete would be useful

That's something that can be improved upon later.

Glad you'll look into this in the future.

[nova-nowiz]

Honestly, that's the only feature missing

[stefansedich]

+1 would love this too, I found that when using baloons you get the signature, but this is no good to me in nvim and would like to see it as I type the ( or in the list of suggestions.

[derlaft]

Same thing with golang. Was looking for the answer in documentation for a long time, but now I've found this issue. Super-important feature which makes completions much more useful.

[alfred2g]

Hi As a workaround / quick fix since dev is pretty slow here (tested for C code only with clangd)

you could modify the result dictionary to add the parameter list as follows in this file

 +        let l:parameters = substitute(get(l:item, 'label', ''), l:word, '', 'g')
         call add(l:results, {
         \   'word': l:word,
         \   'kind': ale#completion#GetCompletionSymbols(get(l:item, 'kind', '')),
         \   'icase': 1,
-        \   'menu': get(l:item, 'detail', ''),
+        \   'menu': l:parameters . ' : '. get(l:item, 'detail', ''),

Not bad for a Sunday morning fix, considering that I have no idea how vim script works nor ale.

Of course you could play with the results to tailor the output to your specific liking.

Regards,

Alfred

[luizribeiro]

@w0rp, would it be reasonable if we added a config to ale that would allow people to override the logic for the autocompletion results from their .vimrc? If so, I might take a stab at a pull request if I have time and no one is planning to work on this.

[zoj613]

Whats the status on this feature? Any known ways to get it working manually? I have been reading through the docs for a while and have no clue how to add this. I have been using BLAS in my C code lately and trying to remember the long function signatures is a pain, especially because the :ALEHover command only works when the linter is not complaining about missing arguments.

[sivakov512]

Any news?

[w0rp]

I recommend those who really want this give implementing it and submitting a pull request a try. I think it could be on by default, and we could add a setting to disable it.