vim-template-lite

A tiny Vim plugin for loading template files.

Installation

Copy the contents of plugin and autoload to ~/.vim on UNIX-like systems, or install with your favorite plugin manager.

Usage

Put your template files into your templates directory ($HOME/.vim/templates by default). The filenames and subdirectory names can be whatever you want.

To load your templates automatically, add an entry to g:template_lite_mappings. To illustrate by example:

If I have a template for a Javascript unit test and I put it in ~/.vim/templates/javascript/template.test.js, I'd have the following line in my .vimrc:

let g:template_lite_mappings = { '*.test.js': 'javascript/template.test.js' }

This will load my template for all files whose filename matches *.test.js.

You can as many entries as necessary, as long as you follow the pattern: template_path format. For example, my .vimrc has the following lines:

let g:template_lite_mappings = {
  \  '*.component.js': 'react-native/component.js',
  \  '*.hoc.js': 'react-native/hoc.js',
  \  '*.styles.js': 'react-native/styles.js',
  \  '*.redux.js': 'react-native/redux.js',
  \  '*.fire.js': 'react-native/fire.js',
  \  '*.component.jsx': 'react/component.jsx',
  \  '*.hoc.jsx': 'react/hoc.jsx',
  \  '*.component.ts': 'angular/component.ts',
  \  '*.sh': 'sh.sh',
  \}

Other Usage

Manual Loading

Use :DisableTemplates to temporarily stop automatically loading templates. Use :EnableTemplates to turn it back on.

Use :LoadTemplate to manually load a template. The argument should be a filename relative to your templates directory, for example :LoadTemplate python/template.py.

:LoadTemplate is Tab-completable, to help you identify your template quickly.

Replacement Text

I intentionally left out automatic text replacement, to allow the user full control over the templates.

You can implement this by hooking up an autocmd instead. For example,

autocmd User TemplateLoad execute "%s/{{filename}}/" . expand("%:t:r") . "/g"

This will replace all instances of {{filename}} in the template with the current filename.

An advantage of this open-ended approach is that you can use other, more powerful plugins for this! For example, I use Tim Pope's abolish.vim plugin to make the replacement case-aware. Check out my example on Gist.

Configuration

• g:template_lite_dir (default: $HOME/.vim/templates)

The directory in which vim-template-lite will look for your templates.

• g:template_lite_autoload (default: 1)

Governs whether vim-template-lite will enable automatic template loading (1 to enable, 0 to disable).

• g:template_lite_mappings (default: {})

A Dictionary mapping filename patterns to the template filename to be automatically loaded for them.

Tiny Vim Plugins

I have a set of functionality in my .vimrc that I intentionally implemented with a minimalist philosophy.

I don't want a monolithic plugin to do all sorts of things for me all at once. Instead, I want tiny plugins that do a single, specific task each.

This way I can compose several of these tiny plugins to achieve what I want, while still allowing me to configure and leave out unwanted behavior. Moreover, I can rely on other excellent tools that already exist!

Licensing

This project is free and open source software, licensed under the MIT license. You are free to use, modify, and redistribute this software.

Take a look at Github's Choose a License page for a bit more detail.