UltiSnips is the ultimate solution for snippets in Vim. It has tons of features and is very fast.

In this demo I am editing a python file. I first expand the #! snippet, then the class snippet. The completion menu comes from YouCompleteMe, UltiSnips also integrates with neocomplete. I can jump through placeholders and add text while the snippet inserts text in other places automatically: when I add Animal as a base class, __init__ gets updated to call the base class constructor. When I add arguments to the constructor, they automatically get assigned to instance variables. I then insert my personal snippet for print debugging. Note that I left insert mode, inserted another snippet and went back to add an additional argument to __init__ and the class snippet was still active and added another instance variable.

The official home of UltiSnips is at https://github.com/sirver/ultisnips. Please add pull requests and issues there.

UltiSnips was started in Jun 2009 by @SirVer. In Dec 2015, maintenance was handed over to @seletskiy.

This assumes you are using Vundle. Adapt for your plugin manager of choice. Put this into your .vimrc.

" Track the engine.
Plugin 'SirVer/ultisnips'

" Snippets are separated from the engine. Add this if you want them:
Plugin 'honza/vim-snippets'

" Trigger configuration. Do not use <tab> if you use https://github.com/Valloric/YouCompleteMe.
let g:UltiSnipsExpandTrigger="<tab>"
let g:UltiSnipsJumpForwardTrigger="<c-b>"
let g:UltiSnipsJumpBackwardTrigger="<c-z>"

" If you want :UltiSnipsEdit to split your window.
let g:UltiSnipsEditSplit="vertical"

UltiSnips comes with comprehensive documentation. As there are more options and tons of features I suggest you at least skim it.

From a gentle introduction to really advanced in a few minutes: The blog posts of the screencasts contain more advanced examples of the things discussed in the videos.

• Episode 1: What are snippets and do I need them?
• Episode 2: Creating Basic Snippets
• Episode 3: What's new in version 2.0
• Episode 4: Python Interpolation

Also the excellent Vimcasts dedicated three episodes to UltiSnips:

• Meet UltiSnips
• Using Python interpolation in UltiSnips snippets
• Using selected text in UltiSnips snippets