I followed a submission to reddit the other day highlighting a few choice plugins for gedit, as I am fond of using the default GNOME text editor. One plugin in particular caught my eye, the document words autocompletion plugin, written by Perriman. Retyping my inventive variable names (not to mention the oft flowery default php function names) is both error-prone and onerous and this plugin is the perfect remedy.

The following applies to Ubuntu Intrepid. I’m using 64 bit, but there’s no difference for 32 bit.

The plugin is not packaged in with the gedit-plugins package and needs to be compiled. It depends on quite a few packages. I chose to cheat a little when installing the required development libraries by first installing the build dependencies for gedit itself. If you haven’t already installed it, the build-essential package will install the most commonly used compilation tools too:

sudo apt-get install build-essential
sudo apt-get build-dep gedit gedit-plugins

Then download the source. The document auto completion plugin depends on Perriman’s gtksourcecompletion, which also needs to be compiled first. The source is available from this Sourceforge page.

Once extracted and in the directory:

./configure --prefix=/usr
make
sudo make install

The plugin itself is also on Sourceforge, the 0.51 version is now on the download page.  Again, once extracted and in the directory:

./configure --prefix=/usr
make
sudo make install

and assuming there are no errors, the plugin should appear in the gedit plugins list (Edit > Preferences > Plugins). Now all I need to do it try to train my left hand pinky not to keep stabbing the tab key for autocompletion!