I often write code using Sublime. Today, I was writing a script in Python and scaffolding out the different functions I thought that I would need, using the pass keyword as a placeholder for the body of each of the functions. A habit that I have (maybe a bad one) is to leave the comment # todo to mark places where I need to make changes. This could be actually filling in an implementation, removing placeholder code, or any other sort of change. Today, one # todo was for refining a constant value, others were for placeholder data, etc. I realized that there was probably a way to make it so that when I typed pass Sublime would autocomplete (or I could tab-complete) to pass # todo.

First, I looked up plugins for Sublime, but that wasn’t quite what I was looking for. Then, I came across snippets. What I wanted is the following simple code

<snippet>
    <content><![CDATA[
pass # todo
]]></content>
    <tabTrigger>pass</tabTrigger>
    <scope>source.python</scope>
</snippet>

I came across this post which has made me want to further customize my programming environment. I’m going to store my changes to my Sublime environment here.