CIDER provides intelligent code completion for both source buffers (powered by cider-mode) and REPL buffers.

Standard completion

Out-of-the box CIDER uses the standard Emacs tooling for code completion. When you press TAB or M-TAB you'll get completion candidates in a dedicated buffer.

Auto-completion

CIDER users are advised to use company-mode to enable auto-completion inside of source code and REPL buffers. To install company-mode do:

M-x package-install RET company RET

After installation, company can be turned on globally, like so --

(global-company-mode)

-- or through mode-specific hooks:

(add-hook 'cider-repl-mode-hook #'company-mode)
(add-hook 'cider-mode-hook #'company-mode)

When company-mode is thus enabled, it will receive completion information from cider-complete-at-point, and requires no additional setup or plugins.

If you'd prefer to trigger completions manually you can add this to you config:

(setq company-idle-delay nil) ; never start completions automatically
(global-set-key (kbd "M-TAB") #'company-complete) ; use M-TAB, a.k.a. C-M-i, as manual trigger

To make TAB complete, without losing the ability to manually indent, you can add this to your config:

(global-set-key (kbd "TAB") #'company-indent-or-complete-common)

company-indent-or-complete-common is available only in company-mode 0.9+ (at the time of this writing it's still in development).

Fuzzy candidate matching

By default company-mode will provide completion candidates with the assumption that whatever you've typed so far (e.g. map-) is a completion prefix (meaning you'd get only candidates that have map- in the beginnings of their names).

You can get enhanced fuzzy completion with company-mode if you install the additional package company-flx. This is powered internally by flx.

Basically with company-flx enabled typing something like mp will show you map-indexed as one of the possible completion candidates.

Completion annotations

Completion candidates will be annotated by default with an abbreviation corresponding to their type, and (contextually) their namespace. The function used to format the annotation can be configured by cider-annotate-completion-function. The abbreviations used are configured by cider-completion-annotations-alist and the context in which their namespace is included is configured by cider-completion-annotations-include-ns.

Completion annotations can be disabled by setting cider-annotate-completion-candidates to nil.

Migrating from auto-complete-mode

In case you have some auto-complete-mode configuration lying around and you want to switch to company-mode there are a few steps you have to take:

• Disable ac-cider-setup or ac-nrepl-setup from running on CIDER hooks

• Remove cider-mode and cider-repl-mode from the ac-modes list