Snippet reminders

There are some pieces of code, or a specific format of writing something that you need frequently, but rarely enough to have to look them up, or at least think for a few extra seconds to remember. A good way to mitigate this interruption is to encode this knowledge in a snippet - even if they are short and easy to type, but just hard to remember.

Here are a few examples I use, with a link to the definition underneath. I use UltiSnips but they should be trivial to adapt to any other snippet system.

alias argument order

alias_method :{new}, :{old}

Source

Before this, I could never remember which argument came first.

shebang

#!/usr/bin/env {bash}

Source

I could never seem to get the first #, !, / in the right order, and then I had to remember which path env was in - no more!

cron training wheels

This one is a bit bigger, the cron syntax is very succinct but unless you use it often there's a good chance to forget - therefore I have a snippet to insert some labels in a comment for me:

  *   *   *   *   * {command}
# |   |   |   |   |
# |   |   |   |   +----- day of week (0 - 7) (Sunday is 0 or 7)
# |   |   |   +------- month (1 - 12)
# |   |   +--------- day of month (1 - 31)
# |   +----------- hour (0 - 23)
# +------------- min (0 - 59)}

Source

The few times I use cron, this is a lifesaver - I also have the entire help-comment as a placeholder so in case I just want it there while typing it out, I can just do tab-backspace to get rid of it when I'm finished.