The Struggle

Ever wondered how you could create a right-away elegant code snippet to share on your Linkedin post or with a colleague?

The problem arose when I had to write internal tech blogs, documentation, or post mortems.

I’ve always struggled to create nice snippets to show some good or bad pieces of code without the usual code block and copy-paste.

Right-after seeing lots of posts on Linkedin using those kinds of snippets I started digging around and I have found some managed services.

An example is Snappify.com but it was too cumbersome to maintain in the long term, with lots of back and forth to adapt the snippet or make changes.

After a couple of writings using this kind of tool, I gave up and went back to the old code block. approach.

Plot twist

Being relatively new to NeoVim (1 year to date as main editor of choice after several years of fails at using it) I thought that there were no such automation to create snippets from inside NeoVim.

I couldn’t have been more wrong about it, after looking around for a nvim plugin to create “just screenshots” of the code I’ve discovered the perfection.

Codesnap.nvim

With a few minutes, I have installed it on my NeoVim environment and quickly generated a snippet as follows:

This snippet has been created in just two steps:

• Selecting the code you want to print in the snippet
• Launching the command to copy the snippet into the clipboard :CodeSnap

How to install

If you are using Lazy as package manager you just need to add the plugin

  {
    "mistricky/codesnap.nvim", 
    lazy = true,
    build = "make",
    cmd = { "CodeSnapSave", "CodeSnap" },
    config = function () 
      return require("codesnap").setup({
        bg_theme = "bamboo",
        watermark = "",
        save_path = "~/Downloads/"
      })
    end
  },

For a complete example, see my dotfile repository

Worth mentioning feature

• :CodeSnap to directly copy the generated snippet into the clipboard for a fast paste
• :CodeSnapSave to directly save the picture into the configured folder for later usage

Installation step-by-step guide

For a complete guide, I will redirect you to the Github repository that is really well documented and easy to follow.

https://github.com/mistricky/codesnap.nvim Kudos to the maintainer, let’s star the repository