Snippets

Snippets insert text with placeholders. Jump to the next placeholder using the snip next command. Insert a snippet by saying snip {user.snippet}, where {user.snippet} is a snippet name.

This video demonstrates snippets.

You can find the snippets available for the active programming language with the help snip command.

Snippets are further documented in the community snippets folder README, which describes the snippet file syntax and useful VSCode extensions for writing snippets.

Editor Support

Snippets can be inserted directly through the VSCode snippet system if you have the command server VSCode extension installed. This also lets snip next use VSCode's support for getting to the next snippet placeholder.

Cursorless is required to wrap code in snippets (see the video or read me for details on wrapping with snippets).

Without Editor Support

Without editor support, snip next assumes that the cursor is on the same line as the current snippet placeholder. If you move the cursor to another line first and then use snip next, the cursor may be moved to the wrong position.

Community will try to insert snippets manually without editor support. Depending on your editor's settings, inserting a snippet may insert extra delimiters and disrupt indentation. You can set the user.snippet_raw_text_paste setting to true to always insert snippets (in contexts without editor support) through pasting, which will get correct formatting in some editors. You can also change the user.snippet_raw_text_spaces_per_tab setting to determine how many spaces to use per tab; in most cases, you should set this to -1 to use tabs instead of spaces. Most code editors will automatically expand tabs to spaces when pasting code, if so configured. Note that you should probably adjust these settings on a per-editor basis in a separate .talon file for each editor. You might be able to further address some formatting issues from your editor not supporting snippets by using an automatic code formatting extension.