Snippets - Common code templates
Speed up the creation of common code blocks with easy to define text templates provided by yasnippet.
M-/ expands the text under the point by any of the methods registered with hippie-expand. Yasnippets is one of the methods registered.
TAB will jump through the expanded snippet if it contains markers.
Example using snippets
In web major mode, typing link and pressing M-/ expands to <link rel="stylesheet" href="url" type="text/css" media="screen" /> placing the cursor on stylesheet. TAB to move the cursor to url to change the name of the CSS file. TAB again until the end marker is reached.
Configure yasnippet
The auto-completion layer adds yasnippet and the official snippet collection, yasnippet-snippets.
Add auto-completion to the dotspacemacs-configuration-layers list in .spacemacs
The clojure layer providing additional snippet templates from the clojure-snippets package.
practicalli/spacemacs.d includes this configuration
Snippets in Auto-completion popups
Snippets can be included in the auto-complete pop-up menu.
TAB to navigate through the list of menu items.
RET to select the snippet and add the template to the buffer.
Add the layer variable auto-completion-enable-snippets-in-popup t to the auto-completion layer in .spacemacs.
Practicalli also recommends adding auto-completion-enable-sort-by-usage t to show the most commonly used snippets at the top of the auto-completion pop-up menu.
(auto-completion :variables
auto-completion-enable-help-tooltip t
auto-completion-enable-snippets-in-popup t
auto-completion-enable-sort-by-usage t)
Snippet save locations
Snippets are saved in ~/.emacs.d/private/snippets/. When ~/.spacemacs.d is used for the Spacemacs configuration, snippets are saved in ~/.spacemacs.d/snippets/ directory.
Each snippet is saved in its own file, named after the alias of the snippet. The snippet file is located in a directory named after the Emacs major mode it belongs to.
A snippet called wip for Clojure has a file name wip and is in saved in directory named clojure.