What is the best code template facility for Emacs?

Question

Particularly, what is the best snippets package out there?

Features:

• easy to define new snippets (plain text, custom input with defaults)
• simple navigation between predefined positions in the snippet
• multiple insertion of the same custom input
• accepts currently selected text as a custom input
• cross-platform (Windows, Linux)
• dynamically evaluated expressions (embedded code) written in a concise programming language (Perl, Python, Ruby are preferred)
• nicely coexists with others packages in Emacs

Example of code template, a simple for loop in C:

for (int i = 0; i < %N%; ++i) {
  _
}

It is a lot of typing for such common code. I want to invoke a code template or snippet which inserts that boilerplate code for me. Additionally it stops (on TAB or other keystroke) at %N% (my input replaces it) and final position of the cursor is _.

Answer 1

TextMate's snippets is the most closest match but it is not a cross-platform solution and not for Emacs.

The second closest thing is YASnippet (screencast shows the main capabilities). But it interferes with hippie-expand package in my setup and the embedded language is EmacsLisp which I'm not comfortable with outside .emacs.

EDIT: Posted my answer here to allow voting on YASnippet.

Answer 2

Personally, I've been using Dmacro for years (ftp://ftp.sgi.com/other/dmacro/dmacro.tar.gz).

Here's a review of it that also mentions some alternatives: http://linuxgazette.net/issue39/marsden.html

Answer 3

The EmacsWiki has a page of template engines.

Of these, I've used tempo in the (distant) past to add table support to html-helper-mode, but don't know how it has progressed in the last 15 years.

Answer 4

I'd add my vote for tempo snippets ... easy to setup, powerful (you can run arbitrary elisp in your template - so that you can downcase things, lookup filenames & classes, count things, etc), set the indentation, integrate with abbrevs ... I use it a lot ;)

Answer 5

I vote for http://cedet.sourceforge.net/srecode.shtml

It has very clean syntax and has access to code environment through Semantic.

Also it is a part of a large well supported CEDET distribution (which was built into Emacs for 24.x version series).

UPDATE YASnippet is also a powerful template engine. But it uses an ugly file naming schema (your file name === template name) for you can't put several templates into a single file and have issues with national character sets...

Answer 6

You can try a lightweight solution muban.el

It is written completely in Elisp and has a very simple syntax.