Frequently Asked Questions

Expansion of abbrev keys is controlled by yas-key-syntaxes. Try removing entries which correspond to the abbrev key character syntax. For example, if you have a snippet with abbrev key "bar", that you don't want to trigger when point follows the text foo_bar, remove the "w" entry (since "bar" has only word syntax characters).

See previous question, but in reverse.

If there is a newline at the end of a snippet definition file, YASnippet will add a newline when expanding that snippet. When editing or saving a snippet file, please be careful not to accidentally add a terminal newline.

Note that some editors will automatically add a newline for you. In Emacs, if you set require-final-newline to t, it will add the final newline automatically.

This is Emacs Bug#26672, so you should upgrade to version 25.3 or better. Otherwise, a workaround is to inhibit flyspell overlays while the snippet is active:

(add-hook 'flyspell-incorrect-hook
          #'(lambda (&rest _)
              (and yas-active-field-overlay
                   (overlay-buffer yas-active-field-overlay))))

Edit the keymaps yas-minor-mode-map and yas-keymap as you would any other keymap, but use yas-filtered-definition on the definition if you want to respect yas-keymap-disable-hook:

(define-key yas-minor-mode-map (kbd "<tab>") nil)
(define-key yas-minor-mode-map (kbd "TAB") nil)
(define-key yas-minor-mode-map (kbd "<the new key>") yas-maybe-expand)

;;keys for navigation
(define-key yas-keymap [(tab)]       nil)
(define-key yas-keymap (kbd "TAB")   nil)
(define-key yas-keymap [(shift tab)] nil)
(define-key yas-keymap [backtab]     nil)
(define-key yas-keymap (kbd "<new-next-field-key>")
  (yas-filtered-definition 'yas-next-field-or-maybe-expand))
(define-key yas-keymap (kbd "<new-prev-field-key>")
  (yas-filtered-definition 'yas-prev-field))

• Note: This question applies if you're still defining snippets whose key is the filename. This is behavior still provided by version 0.6 for backward compatibilty, but is somewhat deprecated…

For example, you want to define a snippet by the key < which is not a valid character for filename on Windows. This means you can't use the filename as a trigger key in this case.

You should rather use the # key: directive to specify the key of the defined snippet explicitly and name your snippet with an arbitrary valid filename, lt.YASnippet for example, using < for the # key: directive:

# key: <
# name: <...></...>
# --
<${1:div}>$0</$1>