Unfortunately, it seems to clash loudly with one of the Ruby or Rails plugins I use (most likely rails.vim, and its RAbbrevs). Being admittedly fairly ignorant when it comes to vimscript, as well as being impatient, I removed snipMate for now. If you have a quick solution for such woes, I'd love to try it.
I'd be willing to maintain a fork on GitHub that avoids clashing with rails.vim (or whatever the issue is), if we can figure it out. Maybe I'll actually properly learn vimscript as a result.
Abbreviations expand into a single output. TextMate Snippets expand that output and then make it trivial to move between the parts you'll want to customize.
So a 'for' abbreviation would output:
for (;;) {
}
and leave the cursor after the }.
A 'for' snippet would output the same thing, but you could bounce on the tab key to move between the three parameters to for, the body of the loop, and the line after the loop.
vim-latexsuite does something similar for creating environments. The default is Ctrl-J for jumping to the next section that needs to be filled in. The procedure takes some getting used to; I didn't like it at first.
Can't get it to work. Using gvim on winxp. Directories are okay, nocompatibile is enabled, using expandtab + softtabstop=4 - but the only thing I get after pressing <tab> after one of the snippet keywords is a single space.
Other than being unable to get the html snippets to work, I like it and will be trying it as a SnippetsEMU replacement (if I can get html files working).
The features listed on that page are not, to my knowledge, supported on snippetsEmu.vim:
"- The syntax of snippets is very similar to TextMate's, allowing easy conversion.
- The position of the snippet is kept transparently (i.e. it does not use marks/placeholders inserted in the buffer), which allows you to escape out of an incomplete snippet, something particularly useful in Vim.
- Variables in snippets are updated as-you-type
- Snippets can have multiple matches
- Snippets can be out of order. For instance, in a do...while loop, the condition can be added before the code."
There are also more snippets for more filetypes enabled by default with snipMate.vim, partly because of the features it supports. I also managed to get it to around half the code, which pleases me but I doubt anyone else would consider it a 'feature' ;)
I'd be willing to maintain a fork on GitHub that avoids clashing with rails.vim (or whatever the issue is), if we can figure it out. Maybe I'll actually properly learn vimscript as a result.