Publish fragment on VSCode snippets

content/atoms/_meta.toml

@@ -10,6 +10,12 @@
 #
 ################################################################################
 
+[[atoms]]
+  published_at = 2024-10-04T11:18:21-07:00
+  description = """\
+Published fragment [TIL: Variables in custom VSCode snippets](/fragments/vscode-snippets), on using built-in variables in VSCode snippets to make publishing to this site incrementally faster.
+"""
+
 [[atoms]]
   title = "APacIa"
   published_at = 2024-10-03T14:35:26-07:00

content/fragments/vscode-snippets.md

@@ -0,0 +1,47 @@
++++
+hook = "Using built-in variables in VSCode snippets to make publishing to this site incrementally faster."
+published_at = 2024-10-04T11:18:21-07:00
+title = "TIL: Variables in custom VSCode snippets"
++++
+
+This blog is entirely driven by Markdown, TOML, and Git. Publishing an [atom](/atoms) or [sequence](/sequences) involves popping open a TOML file, adding a new item to the top, committing to Git, and pushing to origin to trigger a CI action that deploys the site:
+
+``` toml
+[[atoms]]
+  published_at = 2024-10-04T10:24:22-07:00
+  description = """\
+Hello, world!
+"""
+```
+
+This generally works quite well, and in this developer's humble opinion, far preferable to something involving a web UI with a little text box, but when I'm being honest with myself, I have to admit that the friction to editing is a little too high, and prevents me from publishing posts that I would've done if I was on a platform _with_ a web UI and a little text box, like Twitter.
+
+I'd been using [VSCode snippets](https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/editor/userdefinedsnippets) to speed up inserting a new TOML item, but the `published_at` date wasn't automated, so I'd have to jump to a terminal, get a timestamp with `date`, then jump back and paste it. Not a big deal, but a little slow and mildly annoying.
+
+I went back and RTFMed. It turns out that custom snippets support a number of built-in variables like `$TM_FILENAME`, `$CURRENT_SECONDS_UNIX`, or even `$UUID` for a random V4 UUID.
+
+With a few more variables I got it to insert RFC3339 dates exactly like the ones I'd been grabbing from my terminal:
+
+``` json
+{
+	"New atom": {
+		"prefix": "at",
+		"body": [
+			"",
+			"[[atoms]]",
+			"  published_at = $CURRENT_YEAR-$CURRENT_MONTH-${CURRENT_DATE}T$CURRENT_HOUR:$CURRENT_MINUTE:$CURRENT_SECOND$CURRENT_TIMEZONE_OFFSET",
+			"  description = \"\"\"\\",
+			"$1",
+			"\"\"\"",
+			""
+		],
+		"description": "New atom"
+	}
+}
+```
+
+There's quite a few other useful built-ins (e.g. currently selected text, contents of clipboard, start comment), and [transformations with regex](https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/editor/userdefinedsnippets#_transform-examples) are supported.
+
+I also took the time to get the whitespace around the inserted block exactly right, so no extra time is needed to correct it after insertion. All in all I probably saved myself about ten seconds for each snippet use, but it's enough of a gain to make myself marginally more likely to do it.
+
+Next up (hopefully): a mobile publishing workflow, something that's been sorely missing for years.