yasnippet/doc/faq.org

Frequently Asked Questions

• Why are my snippet abbrev keys triggering when I don't want them too?
• Why aren't my snippet abbrev keys triggering when I want them too?
• Why is there an extra newline?
• Why doesn't TAB navigation work with flyspell
• How do I use alternative keys, i.e. not TAB?
• How do I define an abbrev key containing characters not supported by the filesystem?

• Note: In addition to the questions and answers presented here, you might also with to visit the list of solved support issues in the Github issue tracker. It might be more up-to-date than this list.

Why are my snippet abbrev keys triggering when I don't want them too?

Expansion of abbrev keys is controlled by yas-key-syntaxes. Try removing entries which correspond to the abbrev key character syntax. For example, if you have a snippet with abbrev key "bar", that you don't want to trigger when point follows the text foo_bar, remove the "w" entry (since "bar" has only word syntax characters).

Why aren't my snippet abbrev keys triggering when I want them too?

See previous question, but in reverse.

Why is there an extra newline?

If there is a newline at the end of a snippet definition file, YASnippet will add a newline when expanding that snippet. When editing or saving a snippet file, please be careful not to accidentally add a terminal newline.

Note that some editors will automatically add a newline for you. In Emacs, if you set require-final-newline to t, it will add the final newline automatically.

Why doesn't TAB navigation work with flyspell

A workaround is to inhibit flyspell overlays while the snippet is active:

  (add-hook 'flyspell-incorrect-hook
            #'(lambda (dummy1 dummy2 dymmy3)
                (and yas-active-field-overlay
                     (overlay-buffer yas-active-field-overlay))))

This is apparently related to overlay priorities. For some reason, the keymap property of flyspell's overlays always takes priority over the same property in YASnippet's overlays, even if one sets the latter's priority property to something big. If you know emacs-lisp and can solve this problem, send a message to bug-gnu-emacs@gnus.org or the https://github.com/joaotavora/yasnippet/issues/.

How do I use alternative keys, i.e. not TAB?

Edit the keymaps yas-minor-mode-map and yas-keymap as you would any other keymap, but use yas-filtered-definition on the definition if you want to respect yas-keymap-disable-hook:

  (define-key yas-minor-mode-map (kbd "<tab>") nil)
  (define-key yas-minor-mode-map (kbd "TAB") nil)
  (define-key yas-minor-mode-map (kbd "<the new key>") yas-maybe-expand)

  ;;keys for navigation
  (define-key yas-keymap [(tab)]       nil)
  (define-key yas-keymap (kbd "TAB")   nil)
  (define-key yas-keymap [(shift tab)] nil)
  (define-key yas-keymap [backtab]     nil)
  (define-key yas-keymap (kbd "<new-next-field-key>")
    (yas-keymap-disable-hook 'yas-next-field-or-maybe-expand))
  (define-key yas-keymap (kbd "<new-prev-field-key>")
    (yas-keymap-disable-hook 'yas-prev))

How do I define an abbrev key containing characters not supported by the filesystem?

• Note: This question applies if you're still defining snippets whose key is the filename. This is behavior still provided by version 0.6 for backward compatibilty, but is somewhat deprecated…

For example, you want to define a snippet by the key < which is not a valid character for filename on Windows. This means you can't use the filename as a trigger key in this case.

You should rather use the # key: directive to specify the key of the defined snippet explicitly and name your snippet with an arbitrary valid filename, lt.YASnippet for example, using < for the # key: directive:

  # key: <
  # name: <...></...>
  # --
  <${1:div}>$0</$1>