snipper

Inspiration

Dan is a Vim user and I am a Emacs user. In order to unite our warring tribes, we decided to band together and create a snippet generator that will work on every editor.

What it does

Below is a picture of a demo of the snippet generation. It looks for patterns in what you type and adds a star character when we can generalize the input. For example:

def foo():
def bar():

These two lines differ only in the 'foo' and 'bar' slot. Our algorithm finds this and replaces it with a * entry field to create:

def * ():

which an editor transforms into a valid snippet.

How we built it

As you type, the characters are sent to our snippet generating server by the editor. The editor listens for the server to send back good snippets, which the server does as soon as it finds them.

Challenges we ran into

This was our first time doing any work directly in the socket layer, and it quite humbling. Also, coming up with the generalization algorithm was difficult, but we managed to find a pretty decent algorithm.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

• Making a non-trivial program with sockets
• Coming up with the generalization algorithm

What's next for snipper

This could work with multiple editors sending snippets at the same time, and we have plans to make it work remotely so that one could have a general snippet server that works wherever you're coding on.

Built With

• python