Managing groups of snippets

[micangl]

I've been wondering what would be the best way to selective enable certain groups of snippets.

For example, I may be taking different courses and need latex snippets for each of them. I wouldn't want the snippets specific to one course to be available when transcribing the notes of another.

Another example is the following: the other day, I had to write a brief one-off report with lots of quantum mechanics. Since this is quite an unusual occurrence (needing the QM snippets), I would like the ability to enable the QM snippets only for that specific file.

I'm sure that the ability to perform such operations - at least, natively - currently exists. Could this be a potential future feature-additon.

[L3MON4D3]

Hey, sorry for replying so late, I missed your question 😅

Right now, you can do this somewhat easily by setting the filetype of files for each course to something distinct. For example, if you differentiate them by directory, you could do

vim.filetype.add({
	filename = {
		["/path/to/courses/courseA/.*.tex"] = "tex.courseA"
		["/path/to/courses/courseB/.*.tex"] = "tex.courseB"
	}
})

and then register the snippet for each course under courseA or courseB etc.

[micangl]

That seems to be a rather clunky solution. I would have to create a snippet file for each course which, since it would have to be done only once per semester, may still be considered acceptable. The problem is that I'd like to have a general set of snippets, available in every .tex file, and course-specific snippets. I'm thinking that I could create a general tex directory, with all my general snippets, and, then, load them from the individual course files (tex.courseA.lua and tex.courseB.lua).

The issues with this solution are two:

• I would be polluting the filetype-space;
• I will have to create a snippet file for each course I'll ever take, which will pollute my configuration.

But there is also another problem. I need to write reports and notes with a certain frequency. Whilst composing these documents I may need certain snippets, which I wouldn't in normal conditions. With this setup, the only solutions would be to manually load some snippet files, providing me with the specific kind I need (for example: quantum_mechanics.lua, digital.lua, analog.lua).

A possible solution would be to create a directory of topical snippet files, and a menu which would let me load some of these files easily, when I need them. This would solve all the problems I mentioned. This technique, though, comes with its own challenges:

• Which snippet files are needed by each file would have to be cached, so as not to load them each time the file is opened. (I don't know how to approach this caching issue, as the file name and location might change)
• Multiple-file projects would be tough to handle. Would I need to specifiy the snippets for every single file? If not, how would the editor know which snippets to load for the subfiles? (It would have to check for every single .tex file which it opens, if it's part of a multi-file project; this would, of course, be inefficient and possibly ineffective, as the directory structure of each project may be quite original).
• What if the .tex file is moved (or, worse, the main directory of a multi-file project, since we just went over the added difficulties with this case)? If the file were identified by path, the user would need an easy and quick way to change the cache, so as modify the path of the old file to the new one. If modifying the cache were effectively necessary, some sort of fuzzy finding to quickly locate the entry to be modified in the cache would be needed.
• What if I'd like to move around some of the snippets in this topical file? For example, I could split the circuit-design.lua file into the analog-circuit-design.lua and digital-circuit-design.lua files. Then, all the entries in the cache which used the old circuit-design.lua file would be invalidated.

This is, of course, way clunkier.

[L3MON4D3]

Yeah, I agree with the shortcomings, I also wouldn't like seeing these tex.courseA filetypes in my statusline :D

I actually have a somewhat better way of dealing with this, that is probably as flexible as you desire here. I didn't mention it because it requires another plugin I've not yet found the time to polish enough to make public, but what the hell, it may help you :)

You'd have to install nvim-matchconfig and set it up like so:

local mc = require("matchconfig")
mc.setup({
	options = {
		require("matchconfig.extras.options.luasnip_ft_extend"),
	}
})
vim.api.nvim_create_user_command("C", mc.pick_current, {})
vim.api.nvim_create_user_command("CO", ":e " .. vim.uv.fs_realpath(require("matchconfig").get_configfile()), {})

Further, modify luasnip's ft_func to the version supplied by nvim-matchconfig via

require("luasnip").setup({
	...
	ft_func = require("matchconfig.extras.options.luasnip_ft_extend").ft_func
})

Then you can provide custom overrides for specific files in vim.fn.stdpath("config")/config.lua:

local mc = require("matchconfig")
local matchers = mc.matchers

local mfile = matchers.file
local mdir = matchers.dir
local mft = matchers.filetype

local course_dir = "/path/to/courses"
-- apply to tex-files in course-directory `courseA`
mc.register(mdir(course_dir .. "/courseA"), c{
	luasnip_ft_extend = {
		tex = {"tex_courseA"}
	}
})

mc.register(mfile(course_dir .. "/quantum_mechanics.lua"), c{
	luasnip_ft_extend = {
		lua = {"lua_qm"}
	}
})

(in this example, all tex-files in courseA will receive the additional filetype tex_courseA)

You'll still need to create snippets for these custom filetypes (tex_courseA, lua_qm), for that I'd recommend require("luasnip.loaders.from_lua").lazy_load({paths = "./luasnippets"}) (if you're not using it already), since it can hot-reload.

I believe this is a pretty good solution because

Which snippet files are needed by each file would have to be cached, so as not to load them each time the file is opened. (I don't know how to approach this caching issue, as the file name and location might change)

config.lua is the cache, and while you may have to resort to modifying paths by hand, you can certainly set it up so the change is minimal (put the base-directory in a variable, for example).

Multiple-file projects would be tough to handle. Would I need to specifiy the snippets for every single file? If not, how would the editor know which snippets to load for the subfiles? (It would have to check for every single .tex file which it opens, if it's part of a multi-file project; this would, of course, be inefficient and possibly ineffective, as the directory structure of each project may be quite original).

nvim-matchconfig can apply the config based on lua-patterns, which should be flexible enough (?).

What if I'd like to move around some of the snippets in this topical file? For example, I could split the circuit-design.lua file into the analog-circuit-design.lua and digital-circuit-design.lua files. Then, all the entries in the cache which used the old circuit-design.lua file would be invalidated.

Since that cache is editable by hand, this is simple imo :)

I hope this helps you a bit, I'll be happy to give you some more examples if you're not sold :D