I first came across snippets when it was in very early beta. I had been using Code Collector Pro for a few months and I was far from satisfied. I downloaded it and wanted to move over but didn’t want to redo all my snippets. About a month later when Snippets was around beta .8 (one of the final versions before full release) code collector pro corrupted my entire database and I was sold. I started up snippets and took off. Ever since I can’t even imagine how I lasted without it. One thing that the snippets guys brought up to me is their Import utility which is absolutely amazing. Mainly it gives you the ability to import your snippets from different unfortunately popular snippet collecting applications. If you’ve stored a significant amount of snippets in a different application this is exactly what you need.
What it’s made for
Snippets aims to give you a great way to not only save and store your code but also use it anytime anywhere with ease. Their web site puts it perfectly as
“The main idea is to make the process of reusing as easy as possible to avoid wasting your valuable time to write the same code again.”
Who is the target crowd? In my opinion it’s anyone who uses code, ever. The amount of time this will save you from not only not having to type it again but also from not having to find snippets again somewhere on the internet is invaluable.
The Interface
The interface is the most gorgeous aspect of the entire program. It’s perfectly apple-like so you understand exactly how it works right after you start it up. Snippets comes with a few pre-set up code snippets just to show you how it’s set up and then you’re ready to go.
The left side shows your hierarchy of snippets, all of which are originally stored in the library, and then referenced from the different smart groups and groups that you define. Snippets comes set up with a ton of different language options that you can turn on or off accordingly.
If those languages aren’t enough you can even add your own smart groups to store your weird language snippets how you see fit.
The Menu bar
Although the interface of this application is close to perfect, the beauty of it is it’s presence in the menu bar. Obviously, this is a necessity because no one would ever leave the application open all the time when you can simply paste snippets from there. This is where one of my favorite parts of the applications comes in. The attention to detail when it comes to the menu bar side of snippets is absolutely unbelievable. You have a few options for how to interact with the menu bar icon, first off you can set up keyboard shortcuts that will pull up either the search box or a menu of your created groups and the snippets within them. You can also either click the menu bar icon just to pull up the search box or option-click it to pull up your groups.
From there you have even more options. You can either click or hit enter on a snippet to automatically paste it in the active application, or you can do so while holding option to immediately copy it to the clipboard. For me this partnered with ClipMenu(link) has become invaluable.
Syncing
So what’s a great snippets application without the ability to sync your snippets between your computers? Snippets provides you two great ways to do that. First of you can use MobileMe. This is obviously fantastic if you, like myself, are a MobileMe user who just wants to sync them between multiple computers. But instead lets say you want to sync them between people you are working with. Then you have the second solution, dropbox. Dropbox has been one of my favorite applications for a very long time, with its large following and the ability to sync nearly anything between multiple machines, it’s absolutely amazing. Snippets allows you to store your groups of snippets as “Datastores” on dropbox and therefore after you publish it and share the folder with other users, they can link their groups with it and keep your snippets in sync. You can read more about exactly how this works in the 1.1 release notes on the snippets blog.
Sharing via Scrippets
This feature of Snippets was something I just learned about very recently. Scrippets mainly allow you to “perform a custom set of actions” to a selected group of snippets. One of the bigger uses of this is to send your snippets to websites like pastie.org allowing you to quickly share selected snippets simply and easily.
Textmate
For me Textmate has become my main code editor and even text editor for most of what I do. So naturally I’d like to use it with Snippets for as much as I can. Thankfully I can do that as you can see from the menu bar of Snippets I have the option of editing any snippet directly in Textmate or any other application, mainly that allows you to edit your more intense snippets in dedicated code editing applications. That’s nice and all but that’s not enough for me, but it gets even better as far as Textmate is concerned. There is a fantastic Textmate bundle so you can do even more, this bundle allows you to highlight text in Textmate and then directly make it into a snippet of your own.
Overall
Snippets is one of the very few applications that I literally use daily and can no longer imagine living without. Like it says on their front page, “Stop reinventing the code.” It really just isn’t worth your time. This application has literally made it to the point where I can’t think of a single feature I would like added. This is one of the very few applications I could possibly say that about therefore it gets a:
Rating: 5 of 5
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