Snippets: Scope by specific file or pattern

[brpaz]

Global snippets already support being scoped by language and language file snippets are naturally scoped. I would like to expand that "scoping" logic to specific files by matching the filename, for example.

A good use case for this, let's say I want to create snippets for travis.yml file. Right now what I do is to create the snippet scoped to YAML language.

The problem is that it will appear for every YAML file which will pollute the autocomplete with not very useful results if you have snippets for multiple kinds of files that have the same extension. (I don't want to see "travis" related snippets in a "gitlab-ci.yml" file for example) as they are not applicable.

I think this is most critical for configuration files where they have a very specific scope and that you can easily restrict by looking at the filename.

Going further, we could even expand this concept for other kinds of snippets. For example, I can have some project level snippets for building queries and I only want to enable them, in Repository classes and not in Controller classes. You could scope the files it applies using a regex pattern, for example.

I guess this shouldn't be very hard to do and it would vastly improve the suggestions quality of the snippets.

I see adding a new field similar to "scope" called "context" or something where you can specify a regex that will match to the filename.

[vscodebot]

(Experimental duplicate detection)
Thanks for submitting this issue. Please also check if it is already covered by an existing one, like:

• [snippets] new global snippets will not work in already created workspace file (#75511)
• Save highlighted code as snippet (#74711)
• Snippet Option To Auto Execute on Type (#64135)

[jrieken]

Valid request, current workaround is to write an extension that does this.

[brpaz]

Might give a try to do an extension. I have searched in the documentation and I believe that the CompletionProvider API is the way to do this.

Something like this example(https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-extension-samples/blob/master/completions-sample/src/extension.ts).

Getting the current file name, match some files containing the snippet code and add the completion items programmatically.

Am I on the right path?

Thank you.

[jrieken]

Yes, that's the way to go

[jrieken]

should be like a document selector, see #78681 (comment)

[GustavoASC]

Nice feature. We have developed Rech COBOL extension and it has built-in support for external JSON snippets and allows filtering each snippet by filename regex, as can be seen on extension details.

But of course at this moment it's related to this specific COBOL extension. This feature could be refactored and separated into a different extension.

[kevinkhill]

I just ran into wanting to do this! Any progress?

I have jest snippets and would like to scope them to only suggest in *.test.* files 🤔

I did see this in the docs, but language/level is not fine-grained enough to stop this: