Intro

YASnippet is a template system for Emacs. It allows you to type an abbreviation and automatically expand it into function templates. Bundled language templates include: C, C++, C#, Perl, Python, Ruby, SQL, LaTeX, HTML, CSS and more. The snippet syntax is inspired from TextMate's syntax, you can even import most TextMate templates to YASnippet. Watch a demo on YouTube or download a higher resolution version.

Installation

Install the most recent version

Clone this repository somewhere

$ cd ~/.emacs.d/plugins
$ git clone https://github.com/capitaomorte/yasnippet

Add the following in your .emacs file:

(add-to-list 'load-path
              "~/.emacs.d/plugins/yasnippet")
(require 'yasnippet)
(yas-global-mode 1)

Add your own snippets to ~/.emacs.d/snippets by placing files there or invoking yas-new-snippet.

Install with package-install

In a recent emacs M-x list-packages is the recommended way to list and install packages. MELPA keeps a very recent snapshot of YASnippet, see http://melpa.milkbox.net/#installing.

Install with el-get

El-get is a nice way to get the most recent version, too. See https://github.com/dimitri/el-get for instructions. Be sure to install the "master" branch since the 3.x series still use the old googlecode code, base. Consider using this "local" recipe.

(push '(:name yasnippet
              :website "https://github.com/capitaomorte/yasnippet.git"
              :description "YASnippet is a template system for Emacs."
              :type github
              :pkgname "capitaomorte/yasnippet"
              :features "yasnippet"
              :compile "yasnippet.el")
      el-get-sources)

Use yas-minor-mode on a per-buffer basis

To use YASnippet as a non-global minor mode, replace (yas-global-mode 1) with (yas-reload-all) to load the snippet tables. Then add a call to (yas-minor-mode) to the major-modes where you to enable YASnippet.

(add-hook 'prog-mode-hook
          '(lambda ()
             (yas-minor-mode)))

(NOT) Contributing snippets

Please do not open pull requests or ask me to add snippets to YASnippet.

The bundled collection under /snippets is considered frozen: I will not add more snippets to it.

You can point yas-snippet-dirs to good snippet collections out there. If you have created snippets for a mode, or multiple modes, consider creating a repository to host them, then tell users that it should be added like this to yas-snippet-dirs:

(setq yas-snippet-dirs
      '("~/.emacs.d/snippets"            ;; personal snippets
        "/path/to/some/collection/"      ;; just some foo-mode snippets
        "/path/to/some/othercollection/" ;; some more foo-mode and a complete baz-mode
        "/path/to/yasnippet/snippets"    ;; the default collection
        ))

(yas-global-mode 1) ;; or M-x yas-reload-all if you've started YASnippet already.

Importing TextMate snippets

There is a tool extras/textmate-import.rb than can import many actual TextMate snippets. These can be quite complex so the extras/imported/*-mode/.yas-setup.el files help it with the more difficult importation.

I'm focusing on developing textmate-import.rb tool and some yas-setup.el files. In the future /snippets snippets will be deprecated and might be replaced with extras/imported.

Example importation of rails snippets

To start using drnic's snippets for rails development, follow this example. It will convert ruby, rails and html bundles from github repositories. The importation will be guided by the .yas-setup.el files.

After cloning this repository to ~/.emacs.d/plugins/yasnippet

cd ~/.emacs.d/plugins/yasnippet
git submodule init
git submodule update
gem install plist trollop
rake convert_bundles             # will convert ruby, rails and html bundles

Then, in your .emacs file

(add-to-list 'load-path
              "~/.emacs.d/plugins/yasnippet")
(require 'yasnippet)
(setq yas-snippet-dirs '("~/.emacs.d/snippets" "~/.emacs.d/plugins/yasnippet/extras/imported"))
(yas-global-mode 1)

Open some rails file (model, app, etc) and start using the textmate snippets. Note that in the example above we have abandoned the default snippet collection on ~/.emacs.d/plugins/yasnippet/snippets

Documentation, issues, etc

Please refer to the comprehensive (albeit slightly outdated) documentation for full customization and support. If you find a bug, please report it on the GitHub issue tracker. (please do not submit new issues to the old googlecode tracker)

Important note regarding bug reporting

If you think have found a bug, please report it clearly. Yasnippet does have (lots of) bugs and your reporting is very valuable. But I have little time to analyse bugs and the following helps a lot.

So, before reporting try to reproduce the bug without your usual .emacs (or whatever startup file you use). Do so either by starting emacs from the command line with the -Q switch, or by temporarily moving away your .emacs and creating a new smaller one just for reproducing the bug.

Then paste that file, and describe steps taken to reproduce, from an end-user perspective. Try to be as unambiguous as possible. Also, don't forget to state the Emacs version (use M-x emacs-version) and the yasnippet version you are using (if using the latest from github, do git log -1 in the dir).

Any more info is welcome, but don't just paste a backtrace or an error message string you got. I'm not saying your analysis might not be useful but following the instructions above immediately gives me a clear picture of what is happening.

There's an example of a great bug report from issue #189

There is also a YASnippet google group. I will keep the group open for reference and for discussion among users, unfortunately I can't guarantee a timely response, so maybe creating a github issue clearly marking your intent (user support/bug/feature request).

Finally, thank you very much for using YASnippet!