Support snippet variables

[martinring]

The documentation on snippets says:

The snippet syntax follows the TextMate snippet syntax with the exception of 'regular expression replacements', 'interpolated shell code' and 'transformations', which are not supported.

Which implicitly says that VSCode does support variables.

The TextMate documentation on snippet variables says:

You can insert the value of a variable by prefixing the name of the variable with $. All the normal dynamic variables are supported, the most useful probably being TM_SELECTED_TEXT.

Though it does not work, nor does vscode seem to provide an alternative.

---

• VSCode Version: 0.10.11
• OS Version: Fedora 23

Steps to Reproduce:

1. Create user snippet using variable TM_SELECTED_TEXT
2. Use snippet
   -> Does not insert the selected text in place of $TM_SELECTED_TEXT

[martinring]

Any chance this is going to be considered? :)

[alexdima]

@martinring I agree that our documentation does not explicitly mention that variables are not supported, but AFAIK they were never implemented. So this issue is a feature request.

[martinring]

@alexandrudima ok thank you for the clarification. surrounding snippets are quite a common feature of editors. visual studio supports them as does textmate for example. I might look into adding that.

[jreljac]

I'll add in my vote. Being able to highlight text, run a snippet and have that highlighted text replace $TM_SELECTED_TEXT in the snippet is super useful. (Both Textmate and Sublime support this)

[jrieken]

desired variables: selected text, filename, date

[jrieken]

more resources http://manual.textmate.org/snippets.html#variables and https://manual.macromates.com/en/environment_variables.html