When I press ctrl-p and autocomplete a word, is there a way to immediately jump into normal mode by pressing escape without canceling the selection?

Question

I use ctrl-p (and SuperTab with it), quite often to do autocompletion. But what happens quite often is that I press tab to autocomplete, I get the match I want, and then I have to go into normal mode. But when I press escape, it cancels out of the autocompletion. Is there anyway to select the autocompletion choice and then go into normal mode immediately without it canceling?

I know continuing to type will accept the autocompletion by default, but quite often I need to jump to a word, delete it, and type out another word, and then jump back to normal mode (I'd imagine I'm not alone in this). It would be useful to have tab autocompletion available in this scenario.

So is there anything I can press to accept the autocompletion and go into normal mode, without canceling it?

Answer 1

You can use ctrl-e to cancel a selection, and ctrl-y to accept it (followed by ESC to go to normal mode). People usually use ESC to cancel a selection (escape from whatever happens), and also map Enter to complete a selection, if one is active:

inoremap <expr> <silent> <cr> pumvisible() ? "<c-y>" : "<cr>"

If you still want to "complete and go to normal mode" on hitting ESC, you can use something like this instead:

inoremap <expr> <silent> <esc> pumvisible() ? "<c-y><esc>" : "<esc>"

You'll probably have to rely on ctrl-e more now, to cancel a selection (or delete characters with BACKSPACE) ...

BTW, check your ESC mapping - I can very well complete with ctrl-n and use ESC with no problems afterwards.