Snip is a simple and minimal command-line snippet manager.

Features

• View your snippets on command line and also manage them (create, edit, delete) using your favorite editor.
• Command-line auto-completion for the snippets names (supports bash, zsh, fish and powershell).
• Seamlessly integration with fzf to provide fuzzy completion(currently supports zsh shell).
• Syntax highlighting and Git integration

How to use

View a snippet

• Run snip {snippet_name} to view a snippet.
• If you've enabled fzf shell integration in you zsh shell, you can find snippets by fuzzy completion. e.g., type snip ** and press tab.

Edit snippets (Create|Update|Delete)

• Run snip edit to open your snippets repository in your favorite editor.
• Run snip edit {snippet_path} to create|edit your snippet in your favorite editor.
• Run snip rm {snippet_path} to remove a snippet. (use -r flag to remove recursively)

Sync snippets changes with your remote git repository

• Run snip sync [optional commit message] to pull and then push your snippets changes. This command runs the following commands:

git pull origin
git add -A
git commit -m "{your_provided_message | default_message}"
git push origin

Note

before running git sync for first time, you need to initialize git in your snippets directory and also set upstream of your default branch. something like the following commands:

cd $(snip dir)
git init
git remote add origin  {your_repo_remote_path}
# Push your first commit to setup upstream branch
git add -A && git commit -m "Initial commit"
git push -u origin main

Getting started

• Install the snip command.
• Enable auto-completion
• (optional) Set custom snippets directory path.
• (optional) Enable syntax highlighting (recommended)
• (optional) Enable fuzzy completion if your shell is zsh (recommended).
• Use snip :))

Installation

Install using go:

go install -ldflags "-X main.Version=main -X main.Date=`date +'%FT%TZ%z'`"  github.com/mehran-prs/snip@main

Or get pre-compiled executables here

Important

To set up completion, see the instructions below.

Shell integration

Add the following line to your shell configuration file.

• bash

  # Set up snip completion
  source <(snip completion bash)

• zsh

  # Set up snip completion (including fuzzy completion)
  source <(snip completion zsh)

• fish

  # Set up snip completion
  snip completion fish | source

Note

fzf shell integration is a pre-requisite of snip fuzzy completion.

Customization

Set the following env variables to customize snip(e.g., put export SNIP_DIR=/path/to/dir in your shell config file):

Name	Default	Description
SNIP_DIR	~/snippets	The snippets directory. It must be absolute path
SNIP_FILE_VIEWER_CMD	cat	The tool which renders non-markdown files in cmd
SNIP_MARKDOWN_VIEWER_CMD	cat	The tool which renders markdown files in cmd
SNIP_EDITOR	Value of the EDITOR env variable, otherwise vim	The editor which snip uses to let you edit snippets
SNIP_GIT	git	The git command which it uses to sync snippets with your remote git repository
SNIP_EXCLUDE	.git,.idea	comma-separated list of directories that you want to exclude in auto-completion
SNIP_VERBOSE	""	Enable verbose mode (values: true)
SNIP_LOG_TMP_FILENAME	""	Set path to a temporary log file. it's helpful in autocompletion debugging

Commands

Usage:
  snip [command] [flags]
  snip [command]

Available Commands:
  completion  Generate completion script
  dir         prints the snippets directory
  edit        Create|Edit the snippet in the editor
  help        Help about any command
  rm          Remove a snippet or directory
  sync        sync the snippets changes with your remote git repository
  version     Print the version and build information

Flags:
  -h, --help   help for snip

Enable syntax highlighting

• Install bat and glow.

• Set the following env variables in your shell configuration(e.g., ~/.zshrc):

export SNIP_FILE_VIEWER_CMD="bat --style plain --paging never"
export SNIP_MARKDOWN_VIEWER_CMD="glow"

Important

On some operating systems (like ubuntu), the bat executable may be installed as batcat instead of bat, in such cases, set batcat instead of bat in SNIP_FILE_VIEWER_CMD env variable.

Enable fuzzy completion

Note

Currently fuzzy completion is supported just in zsh.

• Install fzf to enable fuzzy completion.
• Set up fzf shell integration

Multi-tenancy (Advanced usage)

I like to have multiple instances of the snip command under different names for multiple repositories. for example snip to manage my snippets, and tasks to manage my tasks. We can do that by creating a soft-link to the snip command (other solutions like aliasing doesn't work perfectly in auto-completion, at least for me :)) ), for example to add the tasks command, follow these steps:

• Link tasks to the snip command:

ln -s $(whereis snip | awk '{print $2}') /usr/local/bin/tasks

• Update your shell config to set the tasks directory for the tasks command(as its snippets directory) and also enable autocompletion for it:

# Set the tasks directory (change to your own tasks directory)
export TASKS_DIR=/path/to/my/tasks

# Enable shell auto-completion (in this example, enabled for zsh)
source <(tasks completion zsh)

Note

You may wonder how the tasks command reads its directory path from TASKS_DIR env variable instead of SNIP_DIR, actually the snip tool reads env variables from {APPNAME}_{ENV_NAME} (in this case TASKS_*) and if it was empty then reads from SNIP_{ENV_NAME}.

Contributing

1. Fork the repository
2. Clone your fork (git clone https://github.com/<your_username>/snip && cd snip)
3. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
4. Make changes and add them (git add .)
5. Commit your changes (git commit -m 'Add some feature')
6. Push to the branch (git push -u origin my-new-feature)
7. Create new pull request

Some helper commands for contributors

# Run tests
go test ./...

# Test coverage
go test -coverprofile cover.out ./...
go tool cover -html cover.out # view as html
go tool cover -func cover.out # output coverage per functions

# Run linters
go install github.com/golangci/golangci-lint/cmd/[email protected]
golangci-lint run ./...

# build
go build -o snip .