Snippets are expandable bits of text, triggered by a keystroke and a bit of primer text, that have predefined tab stops within them in order to quickly add blocks of boilerplate text. TextMate seems to be the current leader in defining snippets, and so most other editors try to act like TextMate. The problem with TextMate is that it's only available on OS X.

Some documentation:

• TextMate reference documentation
• http://v1.garrettdimon.com/archives/trick-your-textmate-snippets
• http://yasnippet.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/doc/define_snippet.html

Snippet collections:

• The official TextMate snippet repository
• TextMate snippets repository converted to windows filename format

Useful code:

• The E Text Editor has been open sourced and it has code to deal with importing snippets directly
• YASnippet is a mode for emacs that uses snippets, but they're written in elisp
  • snippet_copier.py converts TextMate snippets to YASnippets
• Found an old reference to a PyQT application with basic snippet support that has some python base classes that may be useful

I'm trying to add snippet support to peppy, and this is the page I'm using to document my efforts on this topic. There are some tickets related to snippets: #383 being the oldest.

The TextMate repository is the canonical source of snippet definitions, and there are other user-contributed snippets all over the intarwebs. It would be a huge win if I could leverage the existing TextMate snippets compared to the amount of time it would take to make all those snippets from scratch. Plus, there are many snippets out there for languages that I'd have no interest in creating myself (like Perl or Ruby or Pascal), so the ability to use other people's work is of great benefit.

Checking out the subversion repository of snippets requires some help on linux (and presumably doesn't work at all on windows, hence the need for http://code.google.com/p/tmbundles4win/ rather than the original source).

On linux, the locale must be changed before the checkout will succeed:

LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 svn co http://svn.textmate.org/trunk/Bundles textmate-bundles-svn