MonoDevelop Tips: Dynamic Abbrev

MonoDevelop’s code completion for C# provides highly context-sensitive and accurate suggestions. However, it can’t provide completion in plain text, such as comments or strings. To help with cases like this, and for languages where MD does not have a completion engine, we’ve implemented a feature from Emacs called “dynamic abbrev”.

Simply type the start of a word, and then use the dynamic abbrev command to cycle though the available completions for that word until you get the word you want. The default key combination is Alt-/ on Windows or Linux, and Command-/ on Mac. It doesn’t pop up a completion list, it just replaces the completed word in place each time you press the combination. The words used for this autocompletion are found by first looking at all words in the current file, and then the words in all other files that are open.