UltiSnips does not map to ExpandsTrigger

Question

I installed UltiSnips with Vundle by placing

Plugin 'SirVer/ultisnips'¬
Plugin 'honza/vim-snippets'

in my .vimrc as well as this as it says in the readme

let g:UltiSnipsExpandTrigger="<tab>"
let g:UltiSnipsJumpForwardTrigger="<c-b>"
let g:UltiSnipsJumpBackwardTrigger="<c-z>"

I installed the plugin with :PluginInstall and after restarting vim I can see that the plugin is installed by :UltiSnipsEdit which opens a new window to add snippets. I added a basic example and save the file which is saved to the project directory in ./UltiSnips/html.snippets

snippet nn
<header class="main-header"></header>
endsnippet

Now I expect nn to expand into my snippet content after writing it and hitting tab key. However, it did not happen. I tried disabling other plugins that I have installed and mapping expand trigger to a different key / keys but that did not work either. Is there something I am missing here?

Answer 1

So after all the Problem is, that UltiSnips does not search the projectfolder for snippets.

If you read :h UltiSnips-snippet-search-path you can see, that it looks for all folders defined in g:UltiSnipsSnippetDirectories which are subfolders of a directory defined in the runtimepath option.

:h runtimepath shows that this depending on the OS but mostly something like:

                    Unix: "$HOME/.vim,
                    $VIM/vimfiles,
                    $VIMRUNTIME,
                    $VIM/vimfiles/after,
                    $HOME/.vim/after"

Now if you have a plugin manager, the runtimepath will be manipulated. So every folder in your .vim/bundle directory will be added to it.

Thats a fact UltiSnips actually uses for snippets in plugins. the vim-snippets Plugin for example has a folder UltiSnips which is automatically read by UltiSnips since the pluginmanager will add the plugin to the runtimepath

So for you that means, keep all your snippets in a UltiSnips folder somewhere in the runtimepath. Usually ~/.vim/UltiSnips.

There is no possibility for projectspecific snippets (There may be a plugin for that). And I see no reason why there should be projectspecific snippets other then different coding styles. But that is handled by other instruments. If you are interested here is a disscusion about it: https://github.com/SirVer/ultisnips/issues/222

For your issue with the UltiSnipsEdit command there is a g:UltiSnipsSnippetsDir variable. see :h UltiSnipsEdit