Chasing down and embracing that feeling with a welcoming and accepting posture desensitizes you to the feeling over time. Conversely, if you are unwilling to feel the feeling, but instead rely on compulsions and avoidances, desensitization cannot happen.

Sometimes a placeholder can only take a limited number of values in which case we may want to show a menu with these choices. This can be done with the ${«int»|«choice 1»,…,«choice n»|} syntax.

Like variables, tab stops can also have default values (and are generally referred to as placeholders when they do). The syntax is the same: ${«tab stop»:«default value»}. And the default value can contain both text, shell code and other placeholders.

Often though we want to fill in text in several places in the snippet. Multiple tab stops can be provided by inserting $1-$n. The caret will start at $1, then when pressing tab it will move to $2 and $3 on next tab etc. until there are no more tab stops. If you do not explicitly set $0, the caret will be at the end of the snippet.

You can use any of TextMate’s defined variables by prefixing the name of the variable with $. All the normal dynamic variables are supported, the most useful probably being TM_SELECTED_TEXT

If you use snippets to insert plain text there is only one thing you should be aware of: $ and ` are reserved characters. So if you want to insert one of these, prefix it with an escape (i.e. \$).