Allow snippets to start with other characters than alphabetical

[vedmant]

Currently when I write a snippet it only works when it starts with [a-zA-Z] characters, in my other IDE I have tons of snippets that start like /*=, *=, */, and so on, this is not possible with VS Code unfortunately. Allowing this will really improve my experience as I'm really used to my sets of snippets.

[jrieken]

Please share your snippet, the language in which you are trying this, the exact line contents, and how you are inserting a snippet (via IntelliSense, via the Insert Snippet command, or via tab completion). This is important because there are no restrictions about snippets prefixes in general.

[vedmant]

The language is Javascript, for example I have following snippet:

"Comment Section": {
	"prefix": "/*=",
	"body": [
		"/* ========================================================================= *\n * $1\n\\* ========================================================================= */\n",
		"$2"
	],
	"description": "Easily visible comment section"
}

That generates a bold comment separator for a code, like this:

/* ========================================================================= *\
 * Some message
\* ========================================================================= */

It doesn't work however, I tried several prefixes like "*=", "=*", working only those that start with alphabetical letters like "c*", "C=" and so on.

I insert snippet by typing prefix and pressing tab.

I also wanted to add "/*" snippet to generate comments sections like this:

/*
 * Message here
 */

This is something supported by default if other IDEs (there is one asterisk in the beginning).

Other case is Laravel style comments block with prefix: "/*|"

/*
|--------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Comment title
|--------------------------------------------------------------------------
|
| Comment description
|
*/

[jrieken]

Thanks for clarifying. So, "yes" the snippets works but "no" the IntelliSense windows doesn't show when typing /*=. That is because we don't trigger 24x7 IntelliSense (the feature of popping up the completion window while you type) on any character but only for those characters that define words... I see how this is annoying but there is no easy fix for this...

Closing this as a duplicate of #32201

[vedmant]

So tab key works only when IntelliSense can read the prefix? Maybe there is a way to add a hook for tab key, for example with HTML VS Code has Emmet functionality included, it works on tab key and I think is not connected to IntelliSense.

[jrieken]

You must enable tab-completion for this by adding "editor.tabCompletion": true. That will only look at snippets and will insert the snippet that matches the current prefix (no matter what it is). It's very likely what you want

[vedmant]

@jrieken That worked! Thanks!

[karolis-sh]

Adding "editor.tabCompletion": true did not help for my case. I have a snippet:

"Create forEach": {
  "prefix": ".for",
  "body": [".forEach(item => $1)"]
},

And as you see, it did not suggest the snippet (tabbing inserts the for loop).

vscode - Version 1.17.2 (1.17.2)
OS - macOS 10.13