Emacs - No tabbable suggestions for init.el

Question

I am fairly new to Emacs.

After opening init.el I would expect tab completion, just like in the minibuffer when doing Mx and typing part of a command and pressing tab to get the *Completions* window.

However, after entering part of a line:

(add-to-

and pressing tab , Emacs does nothing; it does not show the *Completions* window.

Is there a method of enabling tab completion when editing an .el file?

Answer 1

You can get the TAB key to perform completion simply with

(setq tab-always-indent 'complete)

it won't prevent TAB from reindenting, tho: instead, it refines the behavior of TAB so that if TAB's reindentation has no effect (ie the line is already properly indented), it then tries to perform completion. It should work in most major modes (as long as they provide the needed completion data via completion-at-point-functions ), not just in Elisp.