Announcing ‘mini.snippets’

announce

Manage and expand snippets. LSP snippet syntax, flexible loaders, fuzzy prefix matching, interactive snippet session with rich visualization, and more

Author

Evgeni Chasnovski

Published

December 23, 2024

Originally posted on Reddit

Hello, Neovim users!

Let’s celebrate passed December solstice with the long overdue release of mini.snippets - new module of mini.nvim that can manage and expand snippets. It can also be installed using separate GitHub repository.

Snippets are a vital part of my editing workflow. That’s why I wanted to have ‘mini.snippets’ for about 3 years now. My initial plan was to wait and utilize snippet expansion capabilities in core and implement only snippet management (find/load/match/etc). And indeed, when vim.snippet became a thing in 0.10 back in May I used it together with some small set of commonly used snippets.

Due to time consuming development of ‘mini.icons’ and cleaning ‘mini.nvim’ feature backlog, I started ‘mini.snippets’ mid-September. It proved to be outstandingly long development period for various reasons: both external and internal. Some of them are:

Desire to make things “right”: robust yet flexible, out-of-the-box yet customizable. There were many iterations of back and forth, which were as late as several days ago. Eventually it converged into something, let’s hope it is enough.
Although very capable already, some decisions about vim.snippet direction proved to not sit well with me (not wanting to add dedicated events and forcing <Tab>/<S-Tab> overrides are the main ones). It resulted in a long internal debate about whether having own snippet parsing and interactive session is worth it. The fact that I needed to interact with LSP specification (which I am not very good at) made own implementation even less compelling.

In the end I managed to come up with several distinctive snippet session features that I realized I wanted to have for a long time: no Select mode mappings (extra complexity and visually not adjustable), dynamic highlighting, ability to not stop session immediately at final tabstop, etc. That eventually got me nerd-sniped (by myself, mind you) into deciding to take it on.
Snippet LSP specification is compact, but at the same time allows a lot of weird cases which need to be accounted for (mostly because of nested placeholders and linked tabstops). Finding and addressing them also took many sleepless nights.

Plus all the tests and documentation… a lot of tests and documentation.

But the main thing is that ‘mini.snippets’ is out and it is good. This should take a bit of weight out of my shoulders.

Next thing (after a bit of backlog cleanup) is to add another long overdue feature: snippet support in ‘mini.completion’. As it also requires LSP related work, it might take a while (again).

Features:

Manage snippet collection by adding it explicitly or with a flexible set of performant built-in loaders. See MiniSnippets.gen_loader.
Configured snippets are efficiently resolved before every expand based on current local context. This, for example, allows using different snippets in different local tree-sitter languages (like in markdown code blocks). See MiniSnippets.default_prepare().
Match which snippet to insert based on the currently typed text. Supports both exact and fuzzy matching. See MiniSnippets.default_match().
Select from several matched snippets via vim.ui.select(). See MiniSnippets.default_select().
Insert, jump, and edit during snippet session in a configurable manner:
- Configurable mappings for jumping and stopping.
- Jumping wraps around the tabstops for easier navigation.
- Easy to reason rules for when session automatically stops.
- Text synchronization of linked tabstops.
- Dynamic tabstop state visualization (current/visited/unvisited, etc.)
- Inline visualization of empty tabstops (requires Neovim>=0.10).
- Works inside comments by preserving comment leader on new lines.
- Supports nested sessions (expand snippet while there is an one active).
See MiniSnippets.default_insert().
Exported function to parse snippet body into easy-to-reason data structure. See MiniSnippets.parse().

Please, check it out and tell me what you think! You can leave your suggestions either here in comments or in dedicated beta-testing issue.

Thanks!