ultisnips VS vim-vsnip

I always like people's LaTeX-based note taking setups. I'm a mathematician, so I write a lot of LaTeX too. (And I use vim, so I really like vim+Latex workflows).

It's interesting that this post (or rather, the later post that discusses this) talks about the advantages of UltiSnips. The well-known vim-LaTeX posts written by Gilles Castel (RIP) relied pivotally on UltiSnips.

It's not just that UltiSnips is a snippet engine. There are many of those (including LuaSnip, the other snippet engine mentioned in the OP series of articles). It's that UltiSnips can dispatch arbitrary expressions to short python code sections, and python has a great scientific library. For example, it's trivial to write a `sympy` snippet that will simplify or compute a given expression and write the output in latex for you.

But UltiSnips works *terribly* with neovim [1] [2]. Why? Because UltiSnips uses python, and neovim's python interface is 100x slower than vim's python interface. There are design decisions for this and I'm not trying to say that neovim is bad. I use both vim and neovim. But I use vim+UltiSnips+vimtex for writing LaTeX.

LuaSnip has interpolation too. I suppose it would be possible to write more code that calls from LuaSnip to a system like sympy (or other). But that's work. On the other hand, I think it takes a true power user to actually want or use the fancy interpolation functions.

[1]: https://github.com/SirVer/ultisnips/issues/974

I think in-the-wild examples like Ultisnips deoplete semshi (although they are advanced and somewhat complex) would also be good examples to learn how one can use python for writing plugins.

I didn't know lsp-zero, but this integration seems just for me except for that I am using UltiSnips instead of luasnip. Just curious how difficult do you think it is to add UltiSnips integration along with cmp-nvim-ultisnips?

If you use UltiSnips, you can just do this:

Snipets or code completion can be done in a number of different ways, and how that is configured will depend on what method you use. In the blog he uses the vim plugin ultisnips. You'll find details on configuration for that in that link.

Heyo, I've been trying to get UltiSnips and YouCompleteMe to work, however, I've ran into a bit of a problem. The python36.dll library does not seem to exist for UltiSnips, and YouCompleteMe cannot locate python at all (screenshots at bottom).

My go to these days has been https://github.com/hrsh7th/vim-vsnip. It is compatible with LSP and VSCode snippet format. Since it is in pure VimScript you don’t need to battle configuring python just to get the plug-in to work.

I first started by reading some tutorials but most of those used parser combinators. For me, parser combinators always caused some issues sooner or later (at least in Lua when trying to parse recursive / nested nodes). An example project that uses this technique is vim-vsnip: https://github.com/hrsh7th/vim-vsnip/blob/master/autoload/vsnip/snippet/parser.vim. Later, I found out that Luacheck uses a different approach which I liked better: https://github.com/lunarmodules/luacheck/blob/master/src/luacheck/parser.lua. That's the project that helped me the most while writing my own parsers for different snippet engines.

This plugin could use it? hrsh7th/vim-vsnip

I am not a snippets expert, I don't even currently use snippets. However, I know that both LuaSnip and vim-vsnip can load these vscode style snippets. So my recommendation would be to get the snippets and use one of those two snippet plugins.

For autocompletion I use the nvim-cmp plugin. If you're not coding, it might be overkill. But during writing it helps me a lot, because it autosuggests words that I used in the current buffer, too. The most popular autocomplete plugins should be compatible with the most popular snippets engines like vim-vsnip.

Have you ever wondered how to have a snippet completion in VSCode so you can write Julia code fast but in Neovim? Fear not! vim-vsnip is the plugin you need. This plugin supports LSP/VSCode's snippet format. But first, you need to install cmp-vsnip for this plugin to be sourced to nvim-cmp. Oh btw, these three plugins: nvim-cmp, vim-vsnip, and cmp-vsnip → are made by the same person which is actually cool! If you want to support them, become a sponsor! (I am poor so I cannot sponsor yet 😔)

I believe you want the second variant. Then you should install some snippet plugin like vsnip or luasnip and config it with your completion engine.

https://github.com/hrsh7th/vim-vsnip says it supports vscode style snippets, so apparently you could use https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=kaffeine.advanced-drupal-8-snippets with that plugin.