---

Using Snippets

The Pieces for VS Code Extension streamlines your development process by providing powerful features like saving and reusing snippets, so your most important code is always available.

With the Pieces for Visual Studio Code Extension, you can save all kinds of code snippets, and easily find them and edit them whenever, wherever, and however you need.

Let’s take a look at some examples:

---

---

Boosting Productivity with Snippet Management

With the Pieces for VS Code Extension, you can improve your productivity, standardize code, and maintain clarity across teams and projects by leveraging prewritten code.

The Pieces for VS Code Extension connects you with your development environment, so you can focus on what matters—building great software—while empowering you with tools for efficient code reuse.

• Improved Productivity: Focus on solving new problems rather than resolving old ones.

• Contextual Awareness: Snippets enriched with metadata, descriptions, and links to relevant searches help you remember the origin, purpose, and ideal usage scenarios for each piece of code.

• Code Standardization: Sharing best practices and reusable components helps developers ensure uniform coding practices and conventions are available across different teams and projects.

By using the Pieces for VS Code Extension you can capture and manage these snippets to streamline daily tasks and enhance your workflow in several ways:

Save & Organize

Easily save a function, script, or piece of boilerplate right from the tool menu or with a keyboard shortcut.

Not only are these snippets saved to your personal repository, but they’re enriched with context, metadata, and tags for easy retrieval.

To do this save a code snippet, right-click, and then hover on Pieces and choose Save Current Selection to Pieces—or you can use the keyboard shortcut by using ⌘+shift+’ (macOS) or ctrl+shift+v (Windows/Linux).

Search & Reuse

You can directly search through your collection of saved materials from within VS Code, allowing you to quickly find snippets by keyword or context.

To search, you can access the Search Pieces action in to ways—either from the command palette or with the right-click menu.

In both scenarios, you then enter your query into the dropdown menu, and press return(macOS) or enter (Windows/Linux).

Any related snippets will appear in the results list. From there, you can press return(macOS) or enter (Windows/Linux) to view your snippet, complete with all its saved context, rendered neatly inside the editor.

Edit & Update

Your snippets can evolve as your project grows as you adapt to changing project requirements, or when you move onto new files within your codebase.

In the Saved Materials section of the Pieces Explorer, you can open your saved snippets, refactor or update the code to meet current needs, and save the updated version back to Pieces.

This ensures that your library stays current, relevant, and aligned with your project’s progress—plus, making your materials more efficient only helps you in the long run.

Sharing

Share your snippets directly with team members, even if they don’t use Pieces.

Sharing bits of code you find useful can remove productivity blockers if co-developer is unfamiliar with the project, or if they’re a junior.

For example, a teammate working on server monitoring can use your shared script to automate daily tasks without additional setup.

These shared links also include their original enriched metadata, like tags, descriptions, and other information.

To share a snippet in VS Code, you can either highlight some lines of code, right-click, hover over Pieces and click Share or use keyboard shortcuts—⌘+shift+i (macOS) or ctrl+shift+i (Windows/Linux).

This creates a link you can share with teammates, ensuring easy access to your reusable code.

Exploring Materials

Pieces gives you the power to explore pieces of code in your active file by providing an AI-powered Explore feature which analyzes the selected code and generates useful metadata in a new markdown window.

It’s like having a personal code wikipedia on your desk—except it only contains code you’ve previously written or worked on. Read more about it here.

Related Snippets

By automatically highlighting related snippets, the Pieces for VS Code Extension assists developers in utilizing their code libraries more effectively, minimizing repetitive tasks, and building a more organized and consistent codebase suited to their specific workflow.

Use Cases

With Pieces for VS Code Extension, your snippets become a robust library of reusable code that you can organize, search, edit, and share across projects.

Here are some examples of how you can use them:

Reusable Scheduling Functions

Imagine you’re frequently working on projects that involve scheduling tasks at regular intervals.

Instead of rewriting the same logic for each new project, you can save an evergreen snippet to your Pieces repository.

This allows you to reuse a well-crafted scheduling function across multiple applications that’s useful in a variety of scenarios:

Copypackage main

import (
	"fmt"
	"time"
)

// A reusable function to schedule tasks at a specified interval
func scheduleTask(interval time.Duration, task func()) {
	ticker := time.NewTicker(interval)
	defer ticker.Stop()

	for {
		select {
		case <-ticker.C:
			task()
		}
	}
}

File System Monitoring

If you frequently work on projects that involve monitoring file system changes, you can save a helpful snippet to your Pieces repository that does exactly that, using generic and reusable naming conventions:

Copypackage main

import (
	"fmt"
	"log"
	"github.com/fsnotify/fsnotify"
)

// A reusable function to monitor file system changes
func watchFileChanges(path string) {
	watcher, err := fsnotify.NewWatcher()
	if err != nil {
		log.Fatal(err)
	}
	defer watcher.Close()

	err = watcher.Add(path)
	if err != nil {
		log.Fatal(err)
	}

	for {
		select {
		case event := <-watcher.Events:
			if event.Op&fsnotify.Write == fsnotify.Write {
				fmt.Println("Modified file:", event.Name)
			}
		case err := <-watcher.Errors:
			fmt.Println("Error:", err)
		}
	}
}

Additional Snippet Scenarios

Read up on some additional scenarios and use cases for Pieces Snippets and see how the Pieces for VS Code Extension could benefit you and your workflow.

---

---

Download the Pieces for VS Code Extension today!