Snippet Pixie 1.2 released with support for placeholders 🎉️

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.

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!!!

https://appcenter.elementary.io/com.github.bytepixie.snippetpixie

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"Snippet Pixie 1.2 released with support for placeholders 🎉️" was published on May 3, 2019.