How to use auto yasnippet (aka aya) in your workflow?

By Anak Wannaphaschaiyong

All of the content I presented below can be found at Auto-YASnippet Github repo.

Auto-Yasnippet (aka aya) provides the following interactive commands: aya-create, aya-expand, aya-persiste-snippet, and aya-open-line:

I don’t quite understand aya-open-line yet, so I will not be explaining it here.

This snippet package support ad-hoc style of editing workflow where you can create useful snippet to be reused as you editing.

Without aya, one would have do the following

  1. go to yassnippet directory.
  2. implement snippet template which may required multiple reload of the yassnippet directory via yas-reload-all.
  3. switch back to the to buffer you wish to apply the template.
  4. insert template and edit it.

aya simply skip the above step and automatically create yasnippet template base on context which may be one line or multiple line.

Here is how one can use aya. imagine you have function count_of_red(color) and you want to count three colors: red, blue, and green.

You can start by writing template on the line in the same buffer you are editing.

count_of_~red = get_total("~red");

note: ~ is a aya-marker which will mark word to be replaced.

Then, you will call aya-create with point (cursor) on the same line. Note, ~ should now gone, and you should get the following.

count_of_red = get_total("red");

To reused the template, you just created with aya-create. Just run aya-expand on the line you want to insert the new template.

Done! Blazing fast!

Oh, I heard you want to save the template to a snippet? run aya-persist-snippet. Save.

That’s it.

Peace.