I do a lot of text editing for work and there are some phrases that I have to type frequently. What’s the best way to quickly paste those phrases into a document using a shortcut or keyword? I mainly use Kwrite and Kate as i prefer plain text editors and need no formatting.
Pulsar (i.e. active fork of Atom) has a pretty comprehensive snippets package that comes bundled with the editor. Can be configured with some fairly simple cson, for example with Markdown:
You type helem then press tab and it will expand to Hello Lemmy! when using the Markdown grammar (source.gfm).
It can handle custom tab stops too so you can make a longer preformatted sentence with gaps to insert words which you can just tab through (the $1, $2, $3).
<span style="color:#323232;">'.source.gfm':
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> 'My custom snippet':
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> 'prefix': 'mcs'
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> 'body': 'My snippet stops here $1 and then here $2 and then continues $3'
</span>
You can even do multi-line snippets. For anyone wanting to try it out the docs are here
Yeah with its flags / regex / python support UltiSnips is really the gold standard of a snippet engine. In many other environments “snippets” really just means “substitute one string for another”, where UltiSnips is so much more!
Might be a plugin. I think I’m using friendly-snippets (whatever is in LazyVim). There is also LuaSnip. They feed into my auto completion plugin as one of several sources.
You could make it a format string if it relies on data specific to some file or parameter. You could also make the keybind local to certain modes/files rather than a global keybind if you don’t want to pollute your keybind space.
Visual Studio Code has this feature. You can define user snippets using a JSON format and create any alias you like for each. Then, when editing a document you just start typing the alias and press tab when it suggests the snippet (no mousing around required).
You can also create anchor points for variable content that you then tab through and fill out after inserting a snippet. If you find yourself using the same template for your writing this might be a helpful feature.
This is all out of the box with no plugins installed. Also, I’ll point out that although the docs are coding related, you can make these work for any type of writing.
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