Do you keep them in your IDE, or elsewhere? Do you have an app for that? Are they easily shared?

I realized I have no system at all but could use one to make it easier to find code I’ve written and might need again some day.

By snippets, I am referring to any chunk of code / text in any format or language, of any length.

Thanks!

EDIT A DAY LATER: Thanks you all! Reading all these ideas, I got inspired to create my own little web app. Wish me luck… :)

  • Zeth0s@lemmy.world
    593·
    1 year ago

    I create proper libraries. I don’t do snippets because they make code dirty, redundant and difficult to read on the long run.

    I actively discourage people in my team to use snippets copy and pasted everywhere themselves. If it’s reusable code, it should be usable by everyone and well tested

    • abhibeckert@lemmy.world
      18·
      1 year ago

      This. Replace commonly used code snippets well written code that reduces them to one or two lines of code and take advantage of auto-complete in your IDE.

      For the rare case where that doesn’t make sense… I’m I’ll ususally find (or create) an extension/plugin for my IDE. Something that can be smarter than any snippet.

    • Tekhne@sh.itjust.works
      4·
      1 year ago

      The only case I use snippets for is for debug code that I use often. Sometimes there are things I find myself doing a lot for debugging that don’t have any reason to be in code (e.g. nicely formatting certain objects for debug purposes)

      • xmunk@sh.itjust.works
        1·
        1 year ago

        Write a function or macro so you can reuse them. The project I work on has dozens of debug assisting code paths. Here are two examples: normally when talking to the db you’ll call run($sql, $boundVariables) on a handle. Alternatively you can call debug($sql, $boundVariables) to have the handle run the query normally then rerun the query prefixed with EXPLAIN (blah,blah) to get the execution plan. We also have assembleEmulatedQuery($sql, $boundVariables) which will manually replace all the binding tokens in the SQL with their values, do some string escaping and return a big honking string that you can dump into the database… that last one is useful for performance tuning since it can be used to easily capture expensive query forms. Also - assembleEmulatedQuery will throw an exception on our production environment because it’s unsafe due to the potential of SQL Injection.

        Build debugging functions and add tests over them - future you will thank you!

  • Lysergid@lemmy.ml
    21·
    1 year ago

    Please, can you give an example of such code snippets? I’m wondering what people consider reusable in different projects.

    • derpgon@programming.dev
      4·
      1 year ago

      In PHP, a lot. Unit test are boilerplate 90% of the time, getters and setters (although they can be done via Generate), ORM classes with your default shebang (autoincrement ID), and I could go on and on.

      I dislike snippets for code like “key this array by some logic” - this should be reusable via a dedicated helper or service.

      • xmunk@sh.itjust.works
        22·
        1 year ago

        Getters/setters can also be done automatically by __get, __set or __call it’s even possible to write a base class or trait that does this automatically.

        I am a PHP guru, if you’ve ever got questions I’m happy to help.

        • derpgon@programming.dev
          1·
          1 year ago

          Sadly that’s against best practices, it does not work with IDE autocomplete, and neither with PHPStan / PHPCS. You also don’t get coverage from PHPUnit. And renaming a property does not rename the usage across the whole project. __get and __set should not be heavily used, and the project shouldn’t be based on them.

          Some libraries, like Eloquent, uses them well, but you still need to annotate your class with @property if you want to stay sane.

    • perishthethought@lemm.eeOPEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      It’s got to be here somewhere… (Search for way too long…) Dang, I guess I’ll just write it again from scratch

      Yeah, this is what I am looking to avoid.

      • douglasg14b@programming.dev
        1·
        11 months ago

        I have a weird knack for reverse engineering, and reverse engineering stuff I’ve written 7-10 years ago is even easier!

        I tend to be able to find w/e snippet I’m looking for fast enough that I can’t be assed to do it right yet 😆

  • varsock@programming.dev
    101·
    1 year ago

    I would appretiate if someone could explain the practical utility of snippets because it just dawned on me how useful they might be.

    • coloredgrayscale@programming.dev
      91·
      1 year ago

      Easy access to small snippets of code you often need, but putting them in their own library would be crazy.

      • Opening a file / db connection
      • parsing xml/json/… ,
      • template for unit tests,
      • import and initialization of framework at work.

      Depending on the IDE snippets can also move parts of the code around: (intellij live templates)

      • variable.notnull -> if (variable != null) {… }
      • “text %s”.format -> String.format(“text %s”,…)
    • perishthethought@lemm.eeOPEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      Think about how you write code. Is it all new, or are there functions / API calls / whatever that you might re-use from time to time?

      If that’s possible, think about how you go find that code now. Wouldn’t it be cool if you could type a short bit like, “funcA” and boom! your IDE filled in the whole function? Or, worst case, you flip over to another tool, find the snippet you want, copy and paste it into your work.

      That’s what I am thinking about, at least. I’m just not sure how I want to get there yet.

    • Luvon@beehaw.org
      1·
      1 year ago

      If you are unfortunate enough to code in a language where the “designers” thought EVERYTHING should be multi command structures in an English like syntax……

      Then you basically need them to autocomplete how to correctly write everything 😅

      I use Abap at work from sap. Its special.

      They have over 3000 key word structures. It’s ridiculous.

    • perishthethought@lemm.eeOPEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      Thanks. I am thinking about whether a self-hosted service is overkill for this, for my purposes. I kept my question broad in order to find out if most people just keep their snippets on their own PC or what.

      I will check this out and I’m also looking at Snibox.

  • Veraxus@kbin.social
    6·
    1 year ago

    Jetbrains IDEs have “Live Templates” that I use extensively.

    For little notes and snippets (especially CLI snippets) I use an app called Stashpad, which I LOVE.

  • shiveyarbles@beehaw.org
    4·
    1 year ago

    I have like a zillion notepad++ tabs. Every once in a while I’ll go through the tabs to see if I want to save the snippets.

    • perishthethought@lemm.eeOPEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      That’s where I am now. I keep seeing snippets tools and so I asked here. Now that you’ve seen these replies, what do you think?

      I assume the answer is very specific to the coding you do & your workflow. There’s no single right answer.

  • Gamma@beehaw.orgEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    Vscode syncs them across all my computers (and even into browser sessions), so I use that.

    If you’re meaning a place for code, I have a private scratchpad repo

    • perishthethought@lemm.eeOPEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      I work in VSC most of the time too, so using its built-in user Snippets feature seems to make the most sense. How do you get it to sync across computers? (I can go look into that if it’s a native feature)