Re: Including Yasnippet to Emacs

[joaotavora@gmail.com (João Távora)]

Stefan <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> writes:

> snippet.el is not designed to be user-friendly, but to be easy to
> integrate in a major-mode instead (yasnippet rather sucks in this
> regard, you end up needing to distribute umpteen little files
> instead).

Actually, you can compile these umpteen little files into one file per
mode. See `yas-compile-directory'. Few use it AFAIK, but it's there and
it should work (at least the tests show it does).

And that's because yasnippet already has an elisp interface to defining
snippets, `yas-define-snippets'. There is definitely some suckage to it,
otherwise I wouldn't be writing snippet.el, but users or distribtors
aren't forced to deal with those million files.

> [ BTW, part of the intention behind snippet.el is to make Edebug work
>   with them.  Si in some cases they may turn out to be more
>   user-friendly, rather than less so.  ]

Indeed, I've answered many bugs from those who don't understand why
snippets don't work as intended, and I don't blame them.

> As for "not so powerful", I'm not sure what you mean: they should be
> pretty much as powerful as yasnippet's since yasnippet will be written
> on top of them.  And of course, they can run any Lisp code you like.

Danil, snippet.el is in its core just as powerful as yasnippet. Just a
few bits are missing like in-snippet expansions and snippet revival
after undo, but I plan to (re)implement them all.

>> And they are all not manage keybindings.
> This layer is not provided yet, indeed.  E.g. I want to link snippet.el with
> abbrevs, so the "table of snippets" will be an abbrev table.

And I intend to keep the familiar yasnippet keying mechanism in
yasnippet.el. In general yasnippet will keep most backward
compatibility.

> more docs we could provide.  For snippet.el, it's still in flux and
> there are indeed no docs yet, IIRC.

`define-snippet's docstring contains the gist of what that main entry
point will be. It's quite heavy at 60 lines, so maybe parts of it belong
to the manual, but it should give you an idea of what the defined
snippets can do. Did you read this docstring, Danil?