I'm very proud to announce that Snippet Pixie now includes support for placeholders! 🎉️
This release took an immense amount of work, with lots of thought taken in the design of the placeholders feature, hopefully you find these new super powers useful!
- Date/Time: Insert the current or calculated date/time with configurable format.
- Clipboard: Insert the text contents of the clipboard.
- Snippets: Insert snippets in your snippets!
- Cursor: Set where the cursor should end up after the snippet has expanded.
Read on for a summary of the placeholders feature and how to use the different types of placeholder.
Placeholders
All placeholders are delimited (wrapped) by $$, with the placeholder name starting with an @ symbol.
For example, today's date can be inserted with $$@date$$.
Some placeholders allow for extra arguments when : follows their name and that is followed by the argument. For example a format for a date, or the abbreviation for a snippet. Check the following descriptions for each placeholder for more details.
To use $$ in your snippet body, escape the second $ with a backslash like so: $\$.
@date
Quick Examples:
- Today's date with system format:
$$@date$$ - Today's date with custom format:
$$@date:%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S$$ - Tomorrow's date with system format:
$$@date@+1D$$ - Date 2 weeks from today with custom format:
$$@date@+2W:%x$$ - Time 3 hours from now:
$$@time@+3H$$
@time is an alias for @date, with one important difference, the default output if no format specified is the default time format (%X) rather than default date format (%x).
The optional format specified after : can take a format string as detailed in the GLib.DateTime.format function's docs.
The optional date calculation starts with an @ after the placeholder name, followed by a signed integer and unit. The unit types are as follows:
- Y: Years
- M: Months
- W: Weeks
- D: Days
- h: Hours
- m: Minutes
- s: Seconds
You can apply more than one date calculation, for example +2h+30m adds 2 hours and 30 minutes to the current time.
You can use both positive (+) and negative calculations, for example -3D takes 3 days from the current date.
@clipboard
When $$@clipboard$$ is part of a snippet's body, when its abbreviation is expanded the current text contents of the clipboard will replace the placeholder.
@snippet
You can have up to three levels of embedded snippets with the @snippet placeholder.
The abbreviation for the snippet to be embedded is entered after :, for example $$@snippet:sigg;$$ expands the snippet with abbreviation sigg; in place of the placeholder.
@cursor
Adding $$@cursor$$ to a snippet's body will put the cursor in its place after expansion instead of at the end of the expanded text.
If $$@cursor$$ is entered more than once in a snippet's body or via snippet embedding, then the last occurrence of the cursor placeholder wins.
Get It!!!
