jelly-snippets

A simple text snippets plugin for Obsidian.md.

What does it do?

Pretty simple. You probably have run into snippets before.

1. Specify a mapping of snippet to replacement in the settings tab.

   snippet. |+| replacement!

2. If the cursor is at the end of a snippet...

   snippet.<cursor here>

3. ..then triggering the snippet conversion...

   snippet.<cursor here - TRIGGER!>

4. ..will replace the snippet with its replacement!

   replacement!<cursor here>

In greater detail:

Snippets are defined in a text area (like a file) in settings. Each snippet has two parts: lhs and rhs.

The lhs (left hand side) determines what text gets replaced; the rhs (right hand side) determines what replaces the text.

Naturally, there is a symbol to divide these two halves of a snippet, called a snippet part divider:

|+|, for example. (With spaces at the ends.)

lhs |+| rhs

So when you type lhs and then trigger the snippet command, it will replace the text lhs with rhs.

And, there is a symbol to divide each separate snippet in the list of snippets, called a snippet divider:

-==-, for example.

So if you had the following snippets file:

lhs |+| rhs
-==-
superb |+| superbowls

Then you would have two snippets. If your divider was -==- still and you had the following file:

lhs |+| rhs
superb |+| superbowls

Then typing lhs and triggering the snippet command would replace lhs with:

rhs
superb |+| superbowls

(NOTE: At this point in time, it WON'T work correctly; if you use the part divider in the rhs of a snippet it will fail to register the snippet entirely. I actually have a fix in master for this 066cdab, but I haven't updated the plugin yet.)

Why?

I wanted to make a generic snippets plugin that operated on text and worked as I needed. There is an existing snippets plugin already, Text Snippets by ArianaKhit, but not only is the plugin code somewhat outdated and a little complex, it seems to use an older API. (It is a very good plugin by the way.)

One of my goals writing this was to write a simple plugin that used the API exactly as described by the unofficial docs and by vanilla Typescript. I also wanted to make the core functionality of the plugin more flexible, though of course I have yet to add certain features that would truly provide that.

Another motivation was that I wanted to make a plugin by which I could type in my personal note-taking syntax (called JellyNote); I originally was going to write a whole editor extension, but I eventually realized that I could implement it with snippets. So, I'll be adding features to this plugin as long as I need them for JellyNote syntax.

This plugin also reminds me of LaTeX2Unicode, a neovim plugin which I used extensively in my first two years of college. I liked it because it would automatically change latex to unicode on pressing space; that was it. No stretching for the tab key.

It's since been incorporated back into julia.vim. I didn't originally mean to write a plugin that could provide this kind of functionality - but I suppose the concept of text translation is really useful!

Future Improvements/TODO

• Control characters in snippets (e.g. whitespace, particularly newlines? currently snippets are trimmed on both ends; should probably not trim spaces)
• Semantic symbols in snippets (e.g. where does cursor go afterwards? a snippet with braces might benefit from placing the cursor inside...)
• Regex capabilities
• Bugfixes and auditing?
• Add newline option for snippet definition to make simple snippets easy rather than cumbersome
• Add trigger on enter and a dropdown that allows each setting to either have the whitespace afterwards or not have it. (Currently doesn't work well with Tab; will have to see.)
• Do the things liamcain suggested in my plugin PR to the Obsidian plugin repo.

Other caveats

• The lhs of a snippet cannot have newlines in it. Snippets of that sort will simply fail to work; they'll register but never trigger. The reason why is because I only search from cursor to start of line for snippet text; this is efficient and simple. To fix, we'd have to look backwards from the cursor position and match with the lhs of the snippet. Probably not a hard update, but given that this use case is somewhat rare (imo), I have neglected it. Do submit an issue.