Autocomplete pop up doesn't sometimes in HTML and PHP files

[DavidCheshire]

This is not really a question but an observation on a feature of ST3 that has had me baffled for a while.

I have been mucking about trying to figure out how to edit and extend the autocompletions built into ST3 for a while, and while doing that I created a couple of test files with .html and .php file name extension. These were not web pages, just empty files. I noticed that the autocompletion pop-up box didn’t appear in these files when I expect it at all. This had me baffled for a while. Then I copied some paragraphs from “normal” html and php files into the test files, and was even more baffled when I found that sometimes the pop up appeared when I expected it to, and sometimes it didn’t.

I eventually discovered that if I tried to provoke an autocompletion within the copied text it worked, but at the blank end of the file it didn’t. Let me try to illustrate:

=== file.php starts ===

blah, blah, blah

*autocompletions pop up here*

blah, blah, blah

*but not here* === file ends ===

I had assumed (dangerous) that simply naming the files with .html or .php extensions would clue Sublime into what they were, but it appears that Sublime wants to see some evidence that you know what you are doing before it steps up to the plate - I guess normally the tags at the top and bottom of the file would do the trick, but I write a lot of small files to be served as php includes that I don’t put these tags into.

Kind regards - David

PS: is there any way to get a notification when someone replies to a post on this forum?

[blurk]

I had assumed (dangerous) that simply naming the files with .html or .php extensions would clue Sublime into what they were, but it appears that Sublime wants to see some evidence that you know what you are doing before it steps up to the plate

I haven’t looked at those syntax definitions in detail, but from what I gather about syntax definitions in general (and I guess this would also apply to TextMate) is that they are very layered, with only patterns expected within a particular scope being checked. This makes sense from an efficiency perspective: you wouldn’t want all the patterns for a complex syntax being matched at every point in the file. So it’s likely a flexibility vs efficiency trade-off.