Vim Tips: Snippets without plugins

There are many Vim plugins to create code snippets. But did you know Vim already supports this functionality?

I like relying on vanilla Vim as much as possible, and keep plugins to a minimum. For that reason, I ended up using :help abbreviations to make a simple snippet engine.

It works so well, I'd like to share it! Below is an example of my current setup:

augroup haml
  autocmd!
  autocmd FileType haml inorea <buffer> 
        \ table %table<CR>%thead<CR>%tr<CR>%th {%header row%}<CR><BS><BS>%tbody<CR>%tr<CR>%td {%body row%}
augroup END
nnoremap <Plug>GoToNextPlaceholder :call search('{%[^%]*%}')<CR>va{
imap <silent> <C-q><C-e> <C-v><C-a><C-]><Esc><Plug>GoToNextPlaceholder
nmap <silent> <C-q><C-q> <Plug>GoToNextPlaceholder
imap <silent> <C-q><C-q> <Esc><Plug>GoToNextPlaceholder
vmap <silent> <C-q><C-q> <Esc><Plug>GoToNextPlaceholder

The mappings I use are <C-q><C-e> to expand, and <C-q><C-q> to go to next placeholder, but feel free to change this to whatever you like.

I define snippets inside an augroup, in this case, all HAML snippets are there. Each snippet ends with ctrl-a, that's just so snippets don't get automatically triggered all the time, we want to manually trigger them.

You can input the <ctrl-a> character while typing by pressing <ctrl-v><ctrl-a> in insert mode.

The snippet itself looks like this:

autocmd FileType |my-filetype| inorea <buffer> |my-sippet<c-a>| |my-expansion|

You can use {%placeholders%} in the expansion, to be navigated with <C-q><C-q>. A HAML table snippet looks like this:

autocmd FileType haml inorea <buffer> 
        \ table %table<CR>%thead<CR>%tr<CR>%th {%header row%}<CR><BS><BS>%tbody<CR>%tr<CR>%td {%body row%}

Hope you find it useful!

EDIT: If you like this approach, I created an actual plugin here :) It's less than 100 lines of Vimscript, so if you are into minimal, no-dependency plugins, you'll feel right at home.