Gvim Tab Completion

Question

How can you make gvim do tab completion like the terminal-based vim?

The terminal-based vim displays suggestions instead of auto-completing with the first result in the folder and cycling through those.

Answer 1

This behavior is determined by the 'wildmode' option. The default value is "full", which will give you the behavior you're seeing in gvim. If it is set to something like "longest,list" instead, you will get the behavior you're seeing in terminal vim. I'm not sure about the settings because as you can see in

:help 'wildmode'

there are several settings and combinations of settings to choose from and some combinations behave similarly.

You can see the values of the 'wildmode' option that your gvim and vim are using by executing

:set wildmode?

and you can find where the setting was made by executing

:verbose set wildmode?

It appears to me that your gvim and vim are using different configuration files.

Answer 2

Can you be more specific? Vim has the ability to complete different things in different contexts.

However, gVim should behave very similarly to console Vim, as long as it is sourcing the same configuration files. To verify this, you can run the command ":scriptnames" in both Vim and gVim.