Since I am not particularly interested in syncing all of my Visual Studio Code settings across all of my machines, I am compelled to get granular with the snippets.
On Windows, the default snippets folder is %APPDATA%\Code\User\snippets; on Ubuntu, ~/.config/Code/User/snippets/. I tried plunking a repository directly in this folder only to find that Visual Studio Code did not work correctly from here (e.g. my custom settings were ignored and git data was not read/displayed). Currently the repository sits where it normally should and scripts are used to deploy snippets to their conventional folder.
I used a snippet file from the Visual Studio Code team as a guide to the snippet format.
The Ctrl+Space invocation of snippets seems to display “no suggestions” when text is selected. The Command Palette can be used to find the Insert Snippet command.