Yasnippet: Prompting the user for information to fill in a latex snippet

Question

I write a snippet to insert a theorem environment into a latex document, based upon some snippets created by another project: https://github.com/madsdk/yasnippets-latex .

In the snippet below, the snippet is inserted and emacs prompts the user to input some information for the label. What I wanted to do was get a second prompt ${2} that asks the use for the name of the theorem--which will go into the second marked item in the snippet.

# -*- mode: snippet -*-
# contributor: kb
# key: thrm
# group: math
# name: theorem
# --
\begin{thrm}[${2}]
\label{${1:"waiting for reftex-label call..."$(unless yas/modified-p (reftex-label nil 'dont-insert))}}
$0
\end{thrm}

I tried to emulate input for ${1} in ${2}, but the snippet failed to compile or execute. I suspect I just need a different function that takes an input instead of reftex-label but I am not familiar enough with elisp to know which one.

Any suggestions?

Answer 1

The solution is to use the elisp read-string function. You can swap out the reftex-label stuff and use the more generic function when you want.

Here is an example of a snippet that will take some input text and then italicize it in latex.

# -*- mode: snippet -*-

# key: italicize

# group: environments

# name: italicize

# --

\textit{${1:`(read-string "Enter text: ")`}} $0 

As for the original snippet in the OP, you could try this.

# -*- mode: snippet -*-
# contributor: kb
# key: thrm
# group: math
# name: theorem
# --
\begin{thrm}[${2:`(read-string "Enter description")`}]
\label{${1:"waiting for reftex-label call..."$(unless yas/modified-p (reftex-label nil 'dont-insert))}}
$0
\end{thrm}