Re: the v word but not a religious salvo

[Shelagh Manton <shelagh.manton@gmail.com>]

On Mon, 28 Sep 2009 15:30:11 -0500, Harry Putnam wrote:

> I wondered if anyone here is at all familiar with the different
> insertions related plugins for vim?
> 
> This is not a plug for vim... Although I am embarrassingly dumb about
> elisp, I am a veteran emacs user for over 10 yrs and not looking to
> switch this late in the game, but like lots of people I've used vim most
> of that time too.  Mostly for lighter work like quick edits to system
> files.  Or to do the same remotely so I can rely only on what the remote
> might have onboard.
> 
> One vim plugin I've seen in use called xpt looks and sounds very very
> useful.
> 
> There is a (thankfully short) online demo, you may find it somewhat
> poorly done... I did.  However it does give a good hint as to the power
> of this type of approach to helping programmers along with inserting oft
> repeated things and even whole script outlines.
> 
>   (vim xpt templates plugin)
>   http://vimeo.com/4449258
> 
> I'm not plugging for vim... what I want to ask is if there is any kind
> of thing like this available for emacs.
> 
> I know about skeletons and have written dozens of them for use in
> various places.
> 
> And maybe a skeleton can do the advanced things demo'ed in the above
> cited demo... if so maybe someone has a few examples I can mess with.
> 
> I'm thinking something that not only inserts a chunk but offers more
> help at specific points if you signal that you want that.
> 
> I guess it would be an `interactive' skeleton...  I have no idea how to
> write such a thing but I might be able to distort, slaughter and
> generally torture some else's coding in such a way as to get what I want
> from it.
> 
>
> Otherwise I'd like to know about any packages that do something even
> vaguely similar to vim's xpt.

I've found skeletons to be very flexible and interactive if need be.

I used some quite complex skeletons when I wrote the lilypond-templates 
[[http://code.google.com/p/lilypond-templates/]] package. The skeleton 
page on the emacs-wiki [[http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/SkeletonMode]] 
has some useful ideas too about using small text filter functions within 
a skeleton. Skeletons can also give you choices, and a default if you 
choose nothing. So if you don't grok yasnippets (like me) skeletons could 
still be a help. 

Shelagh