How can I trigger a completion menu in a Sublime Text 2 snippet?

Question

Can I trigger a code completion menu in a Sublime Text 2 snippet? I want a tab stop to display a completion menu with options instead of just highlighting the text.

For example, tabbing once in this snippet will highlight _link. Instead of just highlighting _link, it is possible to display a completion menu with other options like _selector, _content, and make a choice?

<snippet>
    <content><![CDATA[it \{ should${1:_not} have${2:_link} \}]]></content>
    <tabTrigger>it</tabTrigger>
    <scope>source.ruby</scope>
    <description>it { should_? have_? }</description>
</snippet>

Answer 1

Well, what you want is not really possible. However, you could set up a macro that would (1)insert a snippet and (2) activate autocomplete, but I don't think that's really what you want since you can't have custom options that way. You could also consider doing what the ZenCoding plugin does. The plugin will have a tabstop that like this: ${1:option1/option2/option3}. This will at least have the options displayed but they won't really allow for easy selecting and can get really busy fast. You're other option is just to have snippets for your common options and setting the scopes accordingly. For example, where it says <scope>...</scope>, you can specify a specify position where the snippet will apply instead of the just the default source.language. For more about scopes, I suggest you consult the docs here. Using this method might be the easiest and best way. That way in your snippet you could just trigger the autocomplete and the options will include your snippets. A few other options to look into could be creating a .sublime-completions file with a custom scope, or making something similar to Packages/HTML/html_completions.py.