Is it possible to create "snippets"?

[cglong]

I'm new to Clink, so apologies if this is a basic question. I'm wondering if Clink has support for something similar to Visual Studio Code's user-defined snippets. As a basic example, I'd like to be able to write:

C:\>home

then e.g. hit Tab and have my prompt automatically substitute this with:

C:\>cd %USERPROFILE%

[chrisant996]

Tab is typically for completion. What you're looking for is more like "replacement" not "completion". For example, completion lets you start to type the first few characters of something, press Tab, and get help completing what you started typing. E.g. cd %userpTab would complete to cd %USERPROFILE%.

Also, the specific example homeTab -> cd %USERPROFILE% probably isn't a good example for "replacement snippets". Because if you want to change to your user profile directory, you could just type ~Enter.

A better fit in a command shell would be to create an alias. Then you don't even have to manually expand it.

Create an alias with doskey home=cd %userprofile%. If you want to expand to literally cd %userprofile% without also expanding the environment variable, then use an input file with a list of alias definitions, instead of defining it in the command line. See doskey /? for more info, and use internet searches to learn more about doskey.

With the alias defined, then you can use homeEnter to run the command, without even needing to manually expand it.

Or you can type homeCtrl-Alt-F to expand the alias (e.g. to cd %userprofile%) so that you can view it or edit it.

And you can also use it with completion: hoTab would try to complete ho based on files and doskey alias names. It could expand to home, and then you could press Enter to run the alias, or expand it with Ctrl-Alt-F, or so on.

There are many alternatives as well, but that's the most common way to do what you asked about in a command shell.

[cglong]

Thank you for the detailed answer! This looks like exactly what I'm looking for 🙂 In particular, I can add parameters to macros created by doskey and pass those to the aliased command.