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TheSnipWizPlugin

The SnipWiz Plugin

The SnipWiz plugin was generously contributed by Frank Lichtner. It has two parts: a Snippet Wizard and a Template Class Wizard.

Snippet Wizard

This provides a way of inserting commonly-used code snippets direct into your code. Several are provided by default, but you can amend these and add others of your choice. You can insert a snippet into your code by right-clicking and choosing SnipWiz from the context menu.

There are two Placeholder symbols available:

• $ will be replaced by the selection, if any.
• @ sets the position where you want the caret to be after the snippet has been inserted.

For example, one snippet is:

Let's say you had selected the word 'counter' This will expand to

where the '|' symbol represents the caret position (imagine it blinking), in the right place for you to add the maximum-count figure.

The Edit Snippets dialog is accessed from Plugins > SnipWiz > Settings. On its left is a list of menu entries for known snippets. On the right the selected entry is displayed, with the code it inserts. The Change and Remove buttons do the obvious things to the current selection. To add a new item, amend the selection (both the menu item and the code), then click Add.

For example, to add a snippet that surrounds a string with wxT(" and "), amend one of the similar ones. You might change the menu entry from: wxT(" to wxT("$") and the code from: wxT("@") to wxT("$") Click Add to add the new entry. Now if you highlight the word foo in the editor, and select wxT("$") from the context menu, you should now see wxT("foo").

If you press the Ctrl key while clicking on the snippet menu, the snippet is not inserted at the current caret position, but instead is copied to the clipboard and also to an internal buffer. You can do the insertion elsewhere, perhaps repeatly, by pasting in the usual way (e.g. Ctrl-V), or from that buffer (via the context menu). Note however that the original text selection is retained: selecting wxT("$") from the context menu while Ctrl is being pressed and foo selected will copy wxT("foo") to the clipboard; and so multiple pastes will insert multiple wxT("foo")s, irrespective of what is subsequently hightlit.

If you have a multi-line snippet, you should paste from the internal buffer, since this will retain the correct indentation.

Template Class Wizard

Plugins > SnipWiz > Template class runs the Template Class dialog. This lets you create templates of classes to reuse. For example, I often derive from wxDialogs; here's a template that expedites this.

The Header File Template

Open the dialog and choose the second tab, Templates. Provide a sensible label for the template e.g. MyDialog. Add the code that you want in the Header File and Implementation File sections.

The Implementation File Template

The keyword %CLASS% stands for the class name. When the template is used, all occurrences of it will be replaced with the actual class name.

When you've finished, click Add to save the template.


Now change to the Generate Tab and you'll see that the MyDialog entry is available.

Using the Template

To use it, provide a class name (here I've used MyNewDialog). In the 'Project tree folder' field put the name of the virtual folder that will hold the class, and in the 'Path' field enter the directory to use on your hard disc. Generate will now generate a header and a cpp file containing the code.

The Generated .cpp File

Inside your project appropriately-named cpp and header files will have been created, containing the code. You'll see that MyNewDialog has been substituted throughout for %CLASS%.