Creating a LuaSnip snippets plugin

[evesdropper]

Hi! Not sure if this is the right place to ask, but I got some advice to publish my snippets into a plugin. However, I'm not sure how to create a plugin that loads the snippets i have and utils files. Some questions:

1. First of all, does anyone else have an interest in having LaTeX snippets widely available in one click (basically install and go like friendly-snippets but with better snippets)? It seems like it would be useful.
2. If so, is there anyone with plugin development experience who would be willing to help me develop this plugin?

Thanks!

[L3MON4D3]

Nice idea!
IMO it's high time there is a plugin with high-quality snippets (in general, but latex is the filetype which imo benefits the most from thought-out snippets)

Maybe basic plugin-stuff:

• I think you'd only need to have the <yourplugindirectory>/lua/<plugin-name>/init.lua, in which you load the snippets. The init.lua can then be accessed/executed via require("<plugin-name>")

I've had some thoughts about the issues of writing a plugin with lua-snippets for some time, and I'm going to just put them here, I hope they're useful to you 😅

• The most feature-rich way of loading snippets is via the loaders (they can: edit files contributing snippets, reload on edit (not that important in this case I guess), lazy-load snippets (which is very nice to have)), BUT it might be a bit difficult to only load the snippets contributed by a plugin, since load needs either an absolute path (not sure if there's a 100% reliable way of getting the location of the plugin) or just loads any luasnippets-directory it can find in runtimepath, but this would also mean loading snippets that don't belong to the plugin (potentially at least).
  One solution for this would be for us to add a setting where the name of the directory that is searched in runtimepath can be adjusted, then the snippets could be stored in some very specific directory like <yourplugindirectory>/evesdropper_latex_snippets_dont_touch, and load only that (sorry for getting all technical, I hope my point came across 😅).
• when using the loaders, snip_env (which is responsible for getting all the single-letter-shorthands into the snippet files) can't be relied on, it might be different on other machines. So, it can either be not used at all, or we have to add another option to load, where the snip_env can be set for the files loaded by this call (this feels like the nicer option, I'll have to check how feasible it is to implement this)

If your plugin won't contain a great amount of snippets, you could also just use add_snippets, this would be much more straightforward, but lazy-load and the other niceties are lost.

I don't think I want to really closely work on this plugin, but if you have specific questions, feel free to open a discussion here (or in your plugins github ofc, and ping me) :)

[L3MON4D3]

Is the path correct? Could you check by printing it?

[evesdropper]

Yeah, I checked earlier (mb), shows lua/luasnip-latex-snippets/luasnippets as intended I believe.

[L3MON4D3]

Oh, I think the init.lua is just not executed xD
You can add something like require("luasnip-latex-snippets") in plugin/luasnip-latex-snippets.lua (*.lua in <rtp>/plugin/ will be sourced on startup, see :h startup)

[evesdropper]

oh my god, that's so unfortunate 😭 thank you for figuring out this rookie mistake

this sort of debugging gives me throwbacks to taking data structures

and well yes, it does load now and it works, thank you so much for tolerating my silly mistakes.

[company which hired me], you did not see any of this

[L3MON4D3]

That's the kind of stuff you either know or you don't 😅
Now you do :D

[kiryph]

First of all, does anyone else have an interest in having LaTeX snippets widely available in one click (basically install and go like friendly-snippets but with better snippets)? It seems like it would be useful.

Yes, I think this is useful. It can be quite time-consuming to create a satisfying set of LaTeX snippets.

Do you know following?

Plugins

• Iuri Mateus https://github.com/iurimateus/luasnip-latex-snippets.nvim (first commit: Dec 18, 2021)
• JC Zhang https://github.com/jczhang02/luasnips-mathtex-snippets (first commit: Sep 5, 2022)

Personal configs with comprehensive LaTeX snippets

• Elijan Mastnak https://github.com/ejmastnak/dotfiles/tree/main/config/nvim/LuaSnip/tex with a tutorial
  https://www.ejmastnak.com/tutorials/vim-latex/luasnip/
• Hashem A. Damrah (SingularisArt) https://github.com/SingularisArt/snippets/tree/master/tex (UltiSnips)

[L3MON4D3]

Ah, okay.. Yeah you can do that by modifying display, its input is that string which should be put into in a buffer, but you could instead save it to a file.
(You might even modify printer such that valid latex is produced??)

[evesdropper]

I had the following first:

-- Print Snippet Documentation
local sl = require("luasnip.extras.snippet_list")

local display_snippet_info = function (printer_result)
    info_path = debug.getinfo(1).source:sub(2):gsub("lua/luasnip-latex-snippets/init.lua", "doc/snippets.txt")
    local f = assert(io.open(info_path, "w"))
    f:write(printer_result)
    f:close()
end

sl.open({display = display_snippet_info})

though I'm not sure how this would display or get formatted into documentation.

I was thinking of using a bash script to get this done instead. Are there any other more "neovim" like ideas?

[L3MON4D3]

Yeah, getting that into documentation might be more complicated...
(Although, modifying printer such that a markdown-list-entry is produced for each snippet should be possible, only you'd then also have to add some preamble in display_snippet_info)

One issue with snippet_list is that it explicitly looks at all available snippets, not only those loaded by your plugin.
A more robust approach might be to explicitly restrict this to the snippets loaded by your plugin, although that is not yet possible (the association sourcefile->snippet is stored by us, but it's not yet accessible via api)
(wouldn't worry about not going through snippet_list for this, its functionality can be recreated pretty quickly, and it will probably be more readable)

[evesdropper]

Ah gotcha, I'm probably thinking to just write my own for now just because it's not too much so far (and it gives me the liberty to adjust the verbosity of a description depending on the output - e.g. compress multiple related snippets into one explanation, go more into detail with another more involved one).

Will also probably see what I can do with snippet_list though later down the line - as always, thanks for the advice and information!

[L3MON4D3]

Yeah, handcrafted all the way, as long as the effort is worth it 👍
Also, if the description is good, one can also just use snippet_list to get a quick overview of available snippets, but that will obviously not be structured properly, only by filetype

as always, thanks for the advice and information!

Yeah, you're welcome :)