I’ve been working a lot on a new course for Pluralsight, Everyday PowerShell 7 for Developers. I’ve been cranking out a lot of code as a result, PowerShell, obviously, as well as Markdown for documentation.
I’m finding the use of VSCode’s User Snippets to be extremely useful for developing this course. Snippets have allowed me to store my most often used code as templates, quickly manifesting new sections of code.
In PowerShell I’m finding these especially useful for writing Pester tests. Most tests fall into a few simple patterns, using a snippet I can quickly create the bulk of my test, leaving me to fill in the few remaining pieces.
If you know Markdown, you know some of the syntax can be a bit arcane. Using snippets makes it easy to insert commonly used ones, such as being able to type in a snippet name of mdlink and get the correct syntax to appear for a hyperlink.
It also helps with consistency. A small example, for doing italics in Markdown, you can use a singe underscore or a single asterisk. For bold, two underscores or asterisks.
I decided (for no particular reason) to use underscores for italics and asterisks for bold. If it’s been a while since I wrote Markdown though, I may not always remember. So I setup mditalic and mdbold to insert the correct formatting for me.
I’ve placed my snippets in a repository on my github site:
https://github.com/arcanecode/VSCode_User_Snippets
If you aren’t familiar with how to use User Snippets, I have a quick overview in a Markdown file in the repository.
Speaking of Markdown, there is one issue with VSCode. By default, intellisense is not enabled in VSCode for Markdown. While snippets can be used without intellisense, it’s much easier to use them with intellisense turned on.
In the repository I have a Markdown file with information on how to turn intellisense on in VSCode for Markdown files.
Be aware there are also user snippets available through the Extensions Marketplace in VSCode. Just go into the Extensions, and enter Snippet into the search bar. I just didn’t happen to find any that quite suited my needs, hence I created my own.
You’re welcome to copy and use the user snippets, just some or all of them, as you need. Do be aware some of them have my name and websites, such as the author info snippet I use for the bottom of all my Markdown files, or the header snippet for the top of my PowerShell files.
I hope you find user snippets as helpful as I do.
Arcane Code 