Snippets syntax

The snippets are stored in ~/.bluefish/snippets. It is an XML file, like import and export snippets files.

Bluefish has an excellent editor snippets. So it is useless to read this page unless you intend to create a large number of snippets from some documentation, eg: SVG, DOM, etc.

• The import file must have a valid XML syntax.
• The document must include the header: <?xml version="1.0"?>.
• The document must be included in the container: <snippets> <snippets>
• Any snippet must be contained in a branch: <branch title="example"> </branch>
• The branches may contain other branches.
• Each snippet is described in a container: <leaf> </leaf>

Syntax examples

There are two types of snippets: insert and snr, aka Search N Replace.

Insert snippets

1. <?xml version="1.0"?>
2. <snippets>
3. <branch title="Facebook">
4. <leaf type="insert" title="bold"><before>&lt;b&gt;</before><after>&lt;/b&gt;</after></leaf>
5. <leaf type="insert" title="italic" tooltip="insert an italic tag"><before>&lt;i&gt;</before><after>&lt;/i&gt;</after></leaf>
6. <leaf type="insert" title="Hyperlink"><before>&lt;a href="%0"&gt;</before><after>&lt;/a&gt;</after><param name="url"/></leaf>
7. <leaf type="insert" title="em-dash"><before>&amp;mdash;</before><after></after></leaf>
8. </branch>
9. </snippets>

First and important,

if you want to insert any XML reserved characters ie: < > & you have to escape them (red highlighted in example).

• A leaf tag must have type and title attributes,
• it also may have a tooltip attribute (line 5 of example).
  • multiline tooltip, Line Feed &#10;, Carriage return &#13;, Tab &#9;
• Before tag is used for text to insert before, and after tag for text inserted after.
• You have to add one or more param tags (with name attibute) if you want tu use parameters (line 6 of example).

• <param num="1" name="image"/> The num attribute of param is not used, only the order of params declaration is used, first param for %0 etc.
• <param name="source" is_file="1"/> If is_file is set, a Browse button is added in dialog.

Search and replace snippets

SnR snippets are a little more complex:

<leaf type="snr" title="replace 1" tooltip="introduce events" region="b" matchtype="normal" casesens="0" escapechars="0">
 <searchpat>jpg</searchpat>
 <replacepat>jpg" alt="" onmouseout="out(this);" onmouseover="popup(this,'th/</replacepat>
</leaf>

searchpat and replacepat tags,

are replacing before and after tags.

leaf tag have new attibutes,

region

values: b (Entire document), c (forword from cursor position), s (Selection), or a (All open files).

matchtype

values: normal, word, posix or perl.

casesens

values: 1 (set) or 0 (unset).

escapechars

values: 1 (set) or 0 (unset).

Shorthand character classes

you can use \w \W \s \S and . but not \d \D (use [0-9] and [^0-9] instead)

My stylesheet to snippets

todo

see in Category:Snippets repository Bluefish css2snippets snippets