[!WARNING] This plugin is beta quality. Expect breaking changes and many bugs

Blink Completion (blink.cmp)

blink.cmp is a completion plugin with support for LSPs and external sources while updating on every keystroke with minimal overhead (0.5-4ms async). It achieves this by writing the fuzzy searching in SIMD to easily handle >20k items. It provides extensibility via hooks into the trigger, sources and rendering pipeline. Plenty of work has been put into making each stage of the pipeline as intelligent as possible, such as frecency and proximity bonus on fuzzy matching, and this work is on-going.

https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/9849e57a-3c2c-49a8-959c-dbb7fef78c80

Features

• Works out of the box with no additional configuration
• Updates on every keystroke (0.5-4ms non-blocking, single core)
• Typo resistant fuzzy with frecency and proximity bonus
• Extensive LSP support (tracker)
• Native vim.snippet support (including friendly-snippets)
• External sources support (currently incompatible with nvim-cmp sources)
• Auto-bracket support based on semantic tokens (experimental, opt-in)
• Signature help (experimental, opt-in)
• Comparison with nvim-cmp

Requirements

• Neovim 0.10+
• curl
• git

Installation

lazy.nvim

{
  'saghen/blink.cmp',
  lazy = false, -- lazy loading handled internally
  -- optional: provides snippets for the snippet source
  dependencies = 'rafamadriz/friendly-snippets',

  -- use a release tag to download pre-built binaries
  version = 'v0.*',
  -- OR build from source, requires nightly: https://rust-lang.github.io/rustup/concepts/channels.html#working-with-nightly-rust
  -- build = 'cargo build --release',
  -- On musl libc based systems you need to add this flag
  -- build = 'RUSTFLAGS="-C target-feature=-crt-static" cargo build --release',

  opts = {
    highlight = {
      -- sets the fallback highlight groups to nvim-cmp's highlight groups
      -- useful for when your theme doesn't support blink.cmp
      -- will be removed in a future release, assuming themes add support
      use_nvim_cmp_as_default = true,
    },
    -- set to 'mono' for 'Nerd Font Mono' or 'normal' for 'Nerd Font'
    -- adjusts spacing to ensure icons are aligned
    nerd_font_variant = 'normal',

    -- experimental auto-brackets support
    -- accept = { auto_brackets = { enabled = true } }

    -- experimental signature help support
    -- trigger = { signature_help = { enabled = true } }
  }
}

For LazyVim/distro users, you can disable nvim-cmp via:

{ 'hrsh7th/nvim-cmp', enabled = false }

How it works

The plugin use a 4 stage pipeline: trigger -> sources -> fuzzy -> render

Trigger: Controls when to request completion items from the sources and provides a context downstream with the current query (i.e. hello.wo|, the query would be wo) and the treesitter object under the cursor (i.e. for intelligently enabling/disabling sources). It respects trigger characters passed by the LSP (or any other source) and includes it in the context for sending to the LSP.

Sources: Provides a common interface for and merges the results of completion, trigger character, resolution of additional information and cancellation. Some sources are builtin: LSP, buffer, path, snippets

Fuzzy: Rust <-> Lua FFI which performs both filtering and sorting of the items

    Filtering: The fuzzy matching uses smith-waterman, same as FZF, but implemented in SIMD for ~6x the performance of FZF (todo: add benchmarks). Due to the SIMD's performance, the prefiltering phase on FZF was dropped to allow for typos. Similar to fzy/fzf, additional points are given to prefix matches, characters with capitals (to promote camelCase/PascalCase first char matching) and matches after delimiters (to promote snake_case first char matching)

    Sorting: Combines fuzzy matching score with frecency and proximity bonus. Each completion item may also include a score_offset which will be added to this score to demote certain sources. The snippets source takes advantage of this to avoid taking precedence over the LSP source. The parameters here still need to be tuned, so please let me know if you find some magical parameters!

Windows: Responsible for placing the autocomplete, documentation and function parameters windows. All of the rendering can be overridden following a syntax similar to incline.nvim. It uses the neovim window decoration provider to provide next to no overhead from highlighting.

Compared to nvim-cmp

Advantages

• Avoids the complexity of nvim-cmp's configuration by providing sensible defaults
• Updates on every keystroke with 0.5-4ms of overhead, versus nvim-cmp's default debounce of 60ms with 2-50ms hitches from processing
  • Setting nvim-cmp's debounce to 0ms leads to visible stuttering. If you'd like to stick with nvim-cmp, try yioneko's fork or the more recent magazine.nvim
• Boosts completion item score via frecency and proximity bonus. nvim-cmp only boosts score via proximity bonus and optionally by recency
• Typo-resistant fuzzy matching unlike nvim-cmp's fzf-style fuzzy matching
• Core sources (buffer, snippets, path, lsp) are built-in versus nvim-cmp's exclusively external sources
• Built-in auto bracket and signature help support

Planned missing features

• Less customizable with regards to trigger, sources, sorting, filtering
• Significantly less testing and documentation
• Ghost text
• Matched character highlighting
• Cmdline completions
• Windows support (You may temporarily build from source as outlined in the installation section)

Special Thanks

@hrsh7th nvim-cmp used as inspiration and nvim-path implementation modified for path source

@garymjr nvim-snippets implementation modified for snippets source

@redxtech Help with design and testing

@aaditya-sahay Help with rust, design and testing