YASnippet is a template system for Emacs. It allows you to type an abbreviation and automatically expand it into function templates. Bundled language templates includes: C, C++, C#, Perl, Python, Ruby,

SQL, LaTeX, HTML, CSS and more. The snippet syntax is inspired from TextMate's syntax, you can even import most TextMate templates to YASnippet. Watch a demo on YouTube or download a higher resolution version

Clone this repository somewhere

$ cd ~/.emacs.d/plugins 
$ git clone https://github.com/capitaomorte/yasnippet

Add the following in your .emacs file:

(add-to-list 'load-path
              "~/.emacs.d/plugins/yasnippet")
(require 'yasnippet)
(yas/global-mode 1)

Add your own snippets to ~/.emacs.d/snippets by placing files there or invoking yas/new-snippet.

El-get is a nice way to get the most recent version, too

See https://github.com/dimitri/el-get for instructions

Please do not ask me to add snippets to the default collection under /snippets. This is considered frozen and by customizing yas/snippet-dirs you can point yasnippet to good snippet collections out there.

There is a tool extras/textmate-import.rb than can import many actual Textmate snippets and there are extras/imported/*-mode/.yas-setup.el files that can help it with the more difficult importation.

I'm focusing on developping textmate-import.rb tool and the yas-setup.el files. In the future /snippets snippets will be deprecated and replaced with extras/imported.

Follow through the following example to start using these snippets for rails development. It will convert ruby, rails and html bundles from drnic's github repositories based on corresponding .yas-setup.el files.

After cloning this repository to ~/.emacs.d/plugins/yasnippet

cd ~/.emacs.d/plugins/yasnippet
git submodule init
git submodule update
gem install plist trollop
rake convert_bundles             # will convert ruby, rails and html bundles from drnic

Then, in your .emacs file

(add-to-list 'load-path
              "~/.emacs.d/plugins/yasnippet")
(require 'yasnippet)
(setq yas/snippet-dirs '("~/.emacs.d/snippets" "~/.emacs.d/extras/imported"))
(yas/global-mode 1)    

Open some rails file (model, app, etc) and start using the textmate snippets.

Please refer to the comprehensive [documentation] docs for full customization and support. If you find a bug, please report it on the GitHub issue tracker. (please do not submit new issues to the old googlecode tracker)

If you run into problems using YASnippet, or have snippets to contribute, post to the yasnippet google group. Thank you very much for using YASnippet!