Important: This documentation applies to the SVN trunk of YASnippet, which you get here. Documentation for other versions can be found here.

YASnippet is a template system for Emacs. It allows you to type a abbreviation and automatically expand the abbreviation into function templates.

Bundled language templates includes: C, C++, C#, Perl, Python, Ruby, SQL, LaTeX, HTML, CSS and more.

The snippet syntax is inspired from TextMate's syntax, you can even import import most TextMate templates to YASnippet.

YASnippet is a re-write of the extension smart-snippet. Both are original creations of pluskid.

Video Demo

Watch the demo at YouTube (download a higher resolution version: yasnippet.avi).

Installation

There are two archives of YASnippet. One is a single file compiled “bundle”, and the other is normal. If all you need is to use the built-in templates, download the bundle one. If you want to add your own templates, download the normal one.

Bundle Install

  1. Download the latest yasnippet-bundle-x.y.z.el.tgz and unpack it.
  2. You'll get a file named yasnippet-bundle.el, put it under ~/.emacs.d/plugins/ (create the directory if not exists).
  3. Open the file in Emacs, and type Alt+x eval-buffer.

That's it. Now open any one of your language file, you'll see a menu YASnippet. you can pull the menu to insert a template. Or, you can type the pre-defined abbrev and press TAB to expand it.

To have Emacs load YASnippet automatically when it starts, put the following in your ~/.emacs file:

(add-to-list 'load-path
              "~/.emacs.d/plugins")
(require 'yasnippet-bundle)

Normal Install

For full install of the normal archive, just download and unpack the latest yasnippet-x.y.z.tar.bz2. You'll get a directory named yasnippet-x.y.z, put it in your ~/.emacs.d/plugins and add the following in your .emacs file:

(add-to-list 'load-path
              "~/.emacs.d/plugins/yasnippet-x.y.z")
(require 'yasnippet) ;; not yasnippet-bundle
(yas/initialize)
(yas/load-directory "~/.emacs.d/plugins/yasnippet-x.y.z/snippets")

Please refer to the documentation for full customization, or use the customization group.

How to use YASnippet

Since version 0.6, YASnippet contains more functionality. You don't need to know all of it to use it successfully, but you it can improve your snippeting experience.

Hence this section has been split into separate documents:

  1. Organizing Snippets
Describes ways to organize your snippets in the hard disk (or not organize them at all and just use yasnippet-bundle.el.
  1. Expanding Snippets

Describes how YASnippet chooses snippets for expansion at point.

Maybe, you'll want some snippets to be expanded in a particular mode, or only under certain conditions, or be prompted using ido, etc...

  1. Writing Snippets
Describes the YASnippet definition syntax, which is very close (but not equivalent) to Textmate's. Includes a section about converting TextMate snippets.
  1. The YASnippet menu
Explains how to use the YASnippet menu to explore and learn new snippets.

Bugs, Contribution and Support

  • If you find a bug, please report it at Issue List.
  • If you have problem using YASnippet, or have some new ideas, including snippets, please post to the discussion group.

Thank you very much for using YASnippet!