Vim Plugins, surround.vim

This is the fourth post in the article series “Vim Plugins You Should Know About“. This time I am going to introduce you to a plugin called “snipmate.vim“.

If you are intrigued by this topic, I suggest that you subscribe to my posts! For the introduction and first post in this article series, follow this link - Vim Plugins You Should Know About, Part I: surround.vim.

Snipmate.vim is probably the best snippets plugin for vim. A snippet is a piece of often-typed text or programming construct that you can insert into your document by using a trigger followed by a <tab>. It was written by Michael Sanders. He says he modeled this plugin after TextMate’s snippets.

Here is an example usage of snipmate.vim. If you are a C programmer, then one of the most often used forms of a loop is “for (i=0; i<n; i++) { … }”. Without snippets you’d have to type this out every time. Even though it takes just another second, these seconds can add to minutes throughout the day and minutes can add to hours over longer periods of time. Why waste your time this way? With snippets you can type just “for<tab>” and snipmate will insert this whole construct in your source code automatically! If “i” or “n” weren’t the variable you wanted to use, you can now use <tab> and <shift-tab> to jump to next/previous item in the loop and rename them!

Michael also created an introduction video for his plugin where he demonstrates how to use it. Check it out:

How to install snipmate.vim?

To get the latest version:

  • 1. Download snipmate.zip.
  • 2. Extract snipmate.zip to ~/.vim (on Unix/Linux) or ~\vimfiles (on Windows).
  • 3. Run :helptags ~/.vim/doc (on Unix/Linux) or :helptags ~/vimfiles/doc (on Windows) to rebuild the tags file (so that you can read :help snipmate.)
  • 4. Restart Vim.

The plugin comes with predefined snippets for more than a dozen languages (C, C++, HTML, Java, JavaScript, Objective C, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, Tcl, Shell, HTML, Mako templates, LaTeX, VimScript). Be sure to check out the snippet files in the “snippets” directory under your ~/.vim or ~\vimfiles directory.

If you need to define your own snippets (which you most likely will need), create a new file named “language-foo.snippets” in the “snippets” directory. For example, to define your own snippets for C language, you’d create a file called “c-foo.snippets” and place snippets in it.

To learn about snipmate snippet syntax, type “:help snipmate” and locate the syntax section in the help file.

Have Fun!

Have fun with this time saving plugin!