yasmate

A ruby tool to convert textmate snippet bundles to yasnippet format.

These rails-centric conversions already bundled:

• ruby-mode
• html-mode
• rails-mode

Make sure you cloned yasmate with the --recursive option to fetch submodules of the actual "tmbundles" maintained by the Textmate community. In yasmate's top dir:

gem install plist trollop        # two dependencies needed first
rake convert_bundles             # will convert ruby, rails and html bundles

Then, in your .emacs file

(add-to-list 'load-path "/path/to/yasnippet")
(require 'yasnippet)
;; use just the yasmate snippet collection
(setq yas-snippet-dirs '("~/.emacs.d/snippets" "/path/to/yasmate/snippets"))
(yas-global-mode 1)

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

How to convert foo.tmbundle

1. Add a git submodule bundles/foo.tmbundle pointing to the tmbundle repo.

2. Add a snippets/foo-mode directory, assuming foo-mode is the corresponding emacs major-mode.

3. Run yasmate.rb -d bundles/foo.tmbundle -o snippets/foo-mode

That's it, your converted snippets now live under snippets/foo-mode

It messed up on snippet XYZ!!!

Yep, it's unlikely be perfect.

yasmate.rb has some rules for translating bits of Textmate syntax to yasnippet's embedded elisp syntax. I call these substitutions. For example, this is Textmate

${0:$TM_SELECTED_TEXT}

is this in yasnippet

${0:`yas-selected-text`}

Those builtin rules help a lot, but some textmate bundles have very specific substitutions that have to be added into the mix in a per-bundle fashion.

So there are these snippets/foo-mode/.yasmate-extra-substitutions.el files that help with that.

Here's how it works:

1. you follow the steps I gave above

2. you notice that yasmate.rb also created a snippets/foo-mode/.yasmate-unknown-substitutions.el file. You notice the unknown substitution for the snippet XYZ that didn't work

3. you grab that bit, correct it, and paste it into a new snippets/foo-mode/.yasmate-extra-substitutions.el

The format of the substitution files sucks

Yep! It's very ... inventive. And wrong. They should be pure elisp files and yasmate.rb should be rewritten in emacs-lisp to spare the dependency on ruby.