UltiSnips is the ultimate solution for snippets in Vim. It has many features, speed being one of them.

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 deoplete, vim-easycomplete and more. 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 who ran out of time in early 2017. Since Jun 2019, @SirVer is maintaining UltiSnips again on a very constraint time budget. If you can help triaging issues it would be greatly appreciated.

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. You need to change this to something other than <tab> if you use one of the following:
" - https://github.com/Valloric/YouCompleteMe
" - https://github.com/nvim-lua/completion-nvim
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.

There are example uses for some power user features here:

• Snippets Aliases
• Dynamic Tabstops/Tabstop Generation

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