Why UltiSnips does not recognize my own snippets?

Question

Currently I use YouCompleteMe in Vim, then I have installed UltiSnips and vim-snippets with vundler. UltiSnips and YouCompleteMe are compatible and work properly; however, the problem comes when I define my own snippet because these are not recognized.

I suspect that the problem comes when I use the UltiSnipsEdit function because it creates the UltiSnips folder in my home directory and not inside the .vim folder. For example, when I am working with R scripts and I use UltiSnipsEdit, it creates the r.snippets file inside /home/UltiSnips. Then I define a snippet just to test:

snippet test "Testing snip for R." 
# snipp is working
endsnippet

After saving the file, the snippet does not apper on the list of YouCompleteMe nor is expanded with :UltiSnipsExpandTrigger (<c-l> in my case).

Answer 1

Adding let g:UltiSnipsSnippetDirectories=[$HOME.'/.vim/UltiSnips'] to the .vimrc file makes it works.

Answer 2

I am a newbie UltiSnipes user and I got the same issue. It is documented in the offcial documentation (see here and search for UltiSnips-snippet-search-path).

To give you a short and pragmatic solution, my own snippet folder is ~/.vim/myUltiSnips, and I added the following lines to my .vimrc

let g:UltiSnipsSnippetsDir="~/.vim/myUltiSnips"
let g:UltiSnipsSnippetDirectories = ['myUltiSnips']

So (in the first row) you declare you snippets dir with absolute path, then (in the second row) add it to the dirs that UltiSnips search for, but this time using path relative to Vim's runtimepath.

NOTA BENE My Configuration works for me, but, I do not use vim-snippets.

From official docs:

Snippet definition files are stored in snippet directories. A snippet directory must be a subdirectory of a directory defined in the 'runtimepath' option.

g:UltiSnipsSnippetsDir defines the directory private snippet definition files are stored in.

g:UltiSnipsSnippetDirectories defines the directories for looking for snippets. Do not mix up this variable with previous one.

Answer 3

Lets say you have to directories:

• ~/.vim/snips : for your own snippets
• ~/.vim/bundle/vim-snippets/UltiSnips/ : for the vim-snippets

There are two variables involved:

• g:UltiSnipsSnippetsDir : The directory for your own snippets
• g:UltiSnipsSnippetDirectories : A list of directories used for snippets

Without defining those variables in your .vimrc g:UltiSnipsSnippetDirectories is set to UltiSnips (without the path). Apparently it is sufficient to just list the name of the final directory instead of the full path.

let g:UltiSnipsSnippetsDir="~/.vim/snips"
let g:UltiSnipsSnippetDirectories=["snips", "UltiSnips"]

Answer 4

Writing in June 2018, the behaviour is a little odd. First, you have to add the directory for your custom snippets to .vimrc, so I created one in ~/.vim/UltiSnips and added this line to my .vimrc:

let g:UltiSnipsSnippetDirectories=['~/.vim/UltiSnips', 'UltiSnips']

But that still doesn't work because UltiSnips insists on saving anything to a base directory of ~/UltiSnips, and then can't find them again!!! So, after creating a snippet for a python file I saved the snippet file with the vim command:

:saveas ~/.vim/UltiSnips/python.snippets

This saves the snippet in the correct directory, UltiSnips can find the snippet and thereafter it saves any snippets into the correct file for the filetype in the correct directory (and finds it when required).

I have read the docs and I can't find this behaviour there. BTW, it works the same for NVIM and I used a directory of ~/.config/nvim/UltiSnips.

Answer 5

I am using Neovim with UltiSnips and deoplete as my completion engine. The following settings are tested both on Windows 10 (nvim version 0.3.4 )and Linux (CentOS 7, nvim version 0.4.0).

The documentation of UltiSnips has explained how the snippets are searched (see :h UltiSnips-how-snippets-are-loaded). But it is still not crystal clear how to configure so that our custom snippets can be found by UltiSnips.

From the documentation of UltiSnips:

UltiSnips will search each 'runtimepath' directory for the subdirectory names defined in g:UltiSnipsSnippetDirectories in the order they are defined. For example, if you keep your snippets in ~/.vim/mycoolsnippetsand you want to make use of the UltiSnips snippets that come with other plugins, add the following to your vimrc file.

let g:UltiSnipsSnippetDirectories=["UltiSnips", "mycoolsnippets"]

The description above is both informative and confusing because it is written for Vim users, not Neovim users. As a result, if you follow the above example, you will find that the custom snippets are not available for auto-completion.

In the following, I will write what is working for Neovim.

First, open nvim and use the command :echo &runtimepath. This command will print all the runtime paths that Neovim searches. According to the documentaion, your custom snippets directory should be put under one of these runtime paths. On my Windows machine, the output is like (the full output is omitted for brevity):

C:\Users\Administrator\AppData\Local\nvim,C:\Users\Administrator\AppData\Local\nvim\plugged\deoplete.nvim,C:\Users\Administrator\AppData\Local\nvim\plugged\deoplete-jedi,C:\Users\Administrator\AppData\Local\nvim\plugged\neco-vim,.....

On my Linux machine, the output is like (the full output is omitted):

/home/haojiedong/.config/nvim,/home/haojiedong/.local/share/nvim/plugged/deoplete.nvim/,/home/haojiedong/.local/share/nvim/plugged/deoplete-jedi/,/home/haojiedong/.local/share/nvim/plugged/jedi-vim/,.....

Different runtime paths are separated by a comma. The steps of configuring custom snippets are the same for both Windows and Linux. So in the following part, I will only focus on Linux since it is more popular.

One of the runtime paths on Linux is /home/haojiedong/.config/nvim. We choose this directory and create a folder named my_snippets. Then we create a file named markdown.snippets under folder my_snippets. Add the following snippet to markdown.snippets:

snippet kbd "Keyboard tag"
<kbd>${1:KEY}</kbd> $0
endsnippet

This will create a snippet named kbd for markdown filetype.

In the third step, we add the following setting to init.vim:

" `my_snippets` is the directory we created before
let g:UltiSnipsSnippetDirectories=["UltiSnips", "my_snippets"]

Now, open a markdown file and start typing kbd and you should be able to see the kbd autocomplete item:

The completion engine I am using is deoplete and US means that this completion item is from UltiSnips.