#### 7.4.3 Typing Hints and Autocompletion

When turned on, the internal editor can also provide suggestions on how to complete the phrase you started typing, when pressing Ctrl+Space. You can use the up/down arrow keys to select between the offered alternatives and press enter or TAB to select it. Alternatively, you can continue typing the keyword or hit any non-alphanumeric character, which will automatically select the highlighted hint and continue after.

The hints provided are associated with a small icon showing the type of the symbol. On the example below, an entity name (‘`a`’), an option name, a keyword, a design name and a style name is shown.

Various attribute values offer a graphic representation to ease selection.13 The items in italics do not represent actual text to be inserted into the chart, so you cannot select them. They are more like descriptions of what you can write there.

On the `Internal Editor` category of the ribbon you can control how much suggestions you will get and how they are displayed. You can turn hints entirely off. The two bottom checkboxes in the `Auto Completion` panel govern if the list of hints is grouped along dots (to reduce the length of the list) and if hints that are not matching what you have typed so far shall be removed or not. If grouping is on, attributes starting with the same text, such as `line.color` and `line.width` appear as a combined entry as `line.*`. Pressing the dot ‘`.`’ key will automatically auto-complete the common part. If filtering is turned on, only those hints are displayed which begin the same as the word under the cursor. If you continue typing, the list is narrowed by every character. If filtering is off all values valid at the location of the cursor are shown.

Msc-generator can provide you hints even without pressing the Ctrl-Space. In the subsequent panel you can govern in what language contexts do you want to receive such automatic hints. In general it is best to experiment with these settings and see what you like.

If you press Ctrl+Space and there are meaningful suggestions, the hint box pops up even if automatic hints are turned off. If there is only one possible way to finish what you have started typing, that ending is automatically inserted (word auto-completion).

#### Footnotes

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Shapes defined in the current file do not appear with a thumbnail representation. Only shapes defined in design libraries do.