Primary objectives

• Decouple the functionality of user's snippets from the concrete syntax or snippet engine.
• Facilitate and encourage creation and sharing of snippet collections.

Use cases

There are several cases where this plugin comes in handy:

• You are switching to a new snippet engine but don't want to lose your hand-crafted snippets:\ Simply let SnippetConverter convert them to your desired output format.
• You are using a collection of predefined snippets such as friendly-snippets or vim-snippets, however there is that one snippet that always gets in your way:\ Instead of maintaining your own fork of the snippet collection, simply remove or modify the snippet with a few lines of Lua code.
• You dislike the snippets format your snippet engine supports or find it hard to create your own snippets:\ In that case, simply write the snippet in a nicer format (in my opinion, VSCode snippets are quite awkward to write in JSON, why not write them in UltiSnips format and convert them afterwards?).

Other reasons may include:

• You want to validate the syntax of your snippets:\ SnippetConverter includes a graphical UI that will show you exactly where and why your snippet could not be parsed. You can even send the errors to the quickfix list and step through them one by one!
• You are a plugin author and don't want to reinvent the wheel by writing your own parsers:\ SnippetConverter generates a standardized (format-agnostic) AST from your snippet definitions. Feel free to integrate SnippetConverter with your plugin!

Supported snippet engines

SnippetConverter can convert snippets between the following formats:

• VSCode (as well as separate flavors used by vim-vsnip and LuaSnip)
• UltiSnips
• SnipMate
• YASnippet (an Emacs snippet engine)

Is there any other snippet engine or custom format that you think should be supported? Let me know by creating an issue!

Requirements

• Neovim ≥ 0.7

Getting started

To get started, pass a Lua table with a list of templates to the setup function. A template must contain sources (the formats and paths of your input snippets) and output tables (the target formats and paths).

Here's an example to convert a set of UltiSnips and SnipMate snippets to the VSCode snippets format (using packer.nvim):

use {
  "smjonas/snippet-converter.nvim",
  -- SnippetConverter uses semantic versioning. Example: use version = "1.*" to avoid breaking changes on version 1.
  -- Uncomment the next line to follow stable releases only.
  -- tag = "*",
  config = function()
    local template = {
      -- name = "t1", (optionally give your template a name to refer to it in the `ConvertSnippets` command)
      sources = {
        ultisnips = {
          -- Add snippets from (plugin) folders or individual files on your runtimepath...
          "./vim-snippets/UltiSnips",
          "./latex-snippets/tex.snippets",
          -- ...or use absolute paths on your system.
          vim.fn.stdpath("config") .. "/UltiSnips",
        },
        snipmate = {
          "vim-snippets/snippets",
        },
      },
      output = {
        -- Specify the output formats and paths
        vscode_luasnip = {
          vim.fn.stdpath("config") .. "/luasnip_snippets",
        },
      },
    }

    require("snippet_converter").setup {
      templates = { template },
      -- To change the default settings (see configuration section in the documentation)
      -- settings = {},
    }
  end
}

Then simply run the command :ConvertSnippets to convert all snippets to your specified output locations and formats. To see which output folders you should choose depending on your snippet engine, have a look at the section Recommended output paths in the docs.

Documentation

For more detailed instructions, info about customization and examples check out the documentation or help file with :h snippet-converter.

Credits

I want to thank

• L3MON4D3 for creating the awesome snippet engine engine LuaSnip and uga-rosa for permission to use the scandir utility function in my plugin!
• ii14, a contributor to nvim-lua/nvim-package-specification for creating the dedent utility function that is used in this plugin after slight modification.
• williamboman for his plugin nvim-lsp-installer. The UI for SnippetConverter was heavily inspired by this plugin and his code helped me get started with Neovim's window API.