Snippet Issues and Enhancements

[seantronsen]

• some of the expressions will consume the character before them
• many activate in situations where they shouldn't or have bad start expressions like df
• overall many of the expressions still aren't that convenient to type... (better but not best)
• exponent notation doesn't apply for constant and variable letters (or expressions).
• many expect only one character arguments and do not accept full expressions
• there is nothing for trigonometry args
• exponents can't wrap full expression like trig args for inverse cosine, etc.
• add functionality into snippets where muliple symbols in the expression results in multiple expansions
  • for instance nlll results in the expansion of three latex newlines, or \\ \\ \\

[seantrons]

Some more additions, time permitting:

-- add snippet for plane notation (P_1) with the weird squiggle P -- add snippet for stackable primes (derivatives) integrals, etc. -- snippets should include the \ symbol when consuming for easier stacking. -- add snippet for parallel

[seantrons]

Implementation in progress

[seantronsen]

Many of the requested updates have been implemented. Addressing them somewhat in order:

• fixed the snippet engine consuming the character prior to the expansion trigger. The downside is that almost all of the snippets now cannot begin with the first character on the line.
• issues with improper activation have been fixed (for the most part) by ensuring all of the associate triggers must start with a whitespace character to indicate a boundary.
• issue three is a matter of opinion and one that I feel will improve with further usage of these features. right now I think it's simply too early to know for sure what bindings are appropriate and which characters are best for those bindings. My goal at the moment is to try and keep the triggers as short as possible while making them somewhat intuitive to remember (e.g. df for derivative fraction).
• the issue with exponent notation has been fixed and will now involve any two sequences of characters not containing whitespace that are separated by the ';' symbol. the same holds for subscripts. I plan to one day in the future set things up such that the engine can recognize opening and closing brackets, but that will involve quite a bit of rewriting. Perhaps a project for the holidays.
• ibid.
• rather basic trig support has been added. may be subject to change in the future for convenience.
• stackable expansions for certain snippets like prime and newline have been added. a convenience node function has been placed within the snippetutils.lua file.

Part II:

• There is support for a squiggle P for plane notation, but I have no intention of supporting an automation to add subscripts to it. That's what the subscripts snippet is for.
• stackable derivatives and integrals have yet to be added.
• snippets now include all now whitespace characters when consuming.
• parallel has been added.

[seantronsen]

To recap, we still need to add stackable derivative and integral notation, but all the issues mentioned previously in this thread have otherwise been fixed.

[seantronsen]

The new triggers for the snippets are better, but also suffer from some of the same issues as those which came before. For instance, the trigger for \bar ('b {} ') expands the way it was designed too, but that design didn't consider the user typing in the expression b \cos \theta. For this reason, the new design remains a failure despite being more functional.

[seantronsen]

There is also a need to do another round of refactoring for the math snippets and create a more general function that handles the set up.

[seantronsen]

Relying on the space character for expansion is a bit tedious too.