Zshnip

A snippet framework for zsh. Create new snippets as you go. Type snippet alias, press key, expand snippet - if snippet did not exist you are prompted to create one and can then carry on editing.

This framework makes creating snippets low enough friction that actually do it.

Comparison

Features	zsh alias	global alias	zsh-snippets	zshnip
Supports pipes	❌	✅	✅	✅
Snippets automatically saved	❌	❌	❌	✅
Forgot snippet name 😧	😬	😬	😬	😄 (just guess and create a new snippet if wrong)
Remembers cursor position	❌	❌	❌	✅ (useful for commands with pipes )
How snippets are defined	With an editor	editor	editor	😄 at shell itself 😄
Tweak command before run	❌	❌	✅	✅
Create snippets while creating snippets	❌	❌	❌	✅

Gallery

This gallery of features provides animated GIFs that document many features.

This 20 second animated gif gives a good summary of why you might want to use zshnip.

Attribution

This library uses the same approach and incorporates some code from William G Hatch's (willghatch@gmail.com) original library that was in turn influenced by code on forums. The define-as-you-go features were added by facet@facetframer.com.

Code for rendering the presentation to MP4 is taken from asciinema2gif by tav (public domain).

Installation

Step 1: Get the code

Using zplug

    zplug facetframer/zshnip
    zplug install
    zplug load

Using zgen

    zgen load facetframer/zshnip
    zgen init

Raw installation

    cd ~
    git clone https://github.com/facetframer/zshnip.git .zshnip-repo
    source .zshnip-repo/zshnip.zsh

Step 2: Create some key-bindings

Manually create key-bindings for defining snippets. (you can use different bindings if desired)

bindkey '\ej' zshnip-expand-or-edit # Alt-J
bindkey '\ee' zshnip-edit-and-expand # Alt-E

You will need to add the appropriate commands above to your .zshrc to reload at startup.

Usage

After having installed zshnip and defined key-bindings (see the section above):

• Type your snippet alias (e.g. gs)
• Run zshnip-expand-or-edit with Alt-J (or your own key-binding)
• A prompt will appear within your shell to define your snippet
• Type your snippet (e.g. git status) and press ENTER.
• Your snippet will have expanded.
• After this, when you press Alt-J after your snippet alias (e.g. gs) this expansion will be used.

See this section of the presentation.

Motivation

Defining snippets can be problematic:

1. Learning other people's snippets is boring
2. One only knows what snippets you want while you are carrying out a task, not later.
3. Going to an editor to define a snippet can hijack another task.

Can't you just use aliases?

Certainly, you can even supports pipes etc in your aliases using global aliases (alias -g g='| grep '). You could also write a wrapper about alias to persist aliases and use something like https://github.com/jarmo/expand-aliases-oh-my-zsh to expand them.

Using snippets have some benefits

• You can verify that snippets expand to what you want before running them (useful if you have a lot of snippets)
• The define-as-you-go features have various benefits.

Some compelling use cases

Here is a list of the snippets the maintainer uses on a regular basis. These are not built-in, and you might want to phrase them differently, but they could act as inspiration.

gs -> git status
mh -> --help
mf -> --force
g -> | grep -i
gv -> | grep -v
sda -> sed -n '//,$ p'
gap -> git add -p
o -> $(!!)
lm1 -> | tail -n 1
xarm -> xargs -n 1 kill
xarmp -> xargs -p -n 1 kill
sso -> | grep -o ''
sss -> | grep -P '^'
w1 -> | awk '{ print $1 }'
wm1 -> | rev | awk ' { print $1 }'
si -> sudo apt-get install
sa -> sudo !!
ag -> !! | grep

Testing

The code for generating the feature gallery also performs consistency testing. Combining testing and generation of documentation like this has various benefits (see doctest). To run these tests run animation/record-gallery.sh

Similar projects

• https://github.com/1ambda/zsh-snippets is another extension of willghatch's library.
• I am an extensive user of yasnippet in emacs. This will have without doubt influenced features in this project.

License

LGPLv3 (see LICENSE for details.)

Copyleft licenses can be controversial. This project feels like more of application than a library so a copyleft license seems like a good choice. If there is a compelling reasons to place this under a more permissive license this would not be difficult.