PHP constructor macros

I’ve been watching Jeffrey Way’s Laracasts recently—more specifically, Object-Oriented Bootcamp—and became interested in a macro he used to automate rote tasks such as adding properties to constructor methods. I believe he was using Sublime Text to handle his snippets and macros, but I replicated (more or less) the same tasks with vim.

First, install the vim plugin UltiSnips. Next, create a snippet in ~/.vim/UltiSnips/php.snippets:

snippet _c "Constructor"
public function __construct(${1})
{
}
endsnippet

Now, add the following to your .vimrc:

let @a='lyF${iprotected ;^C^CPo^C^Cjjo$this-> = ;^C^CPlybbbblp'
let @b='lyF$k?protected^Moprotected ;^C^CPjjj%O$this-> = ;^C^CPlybbbblp'

Now, when you are in a PHP file, you can type _c then <tab> to create a constructor function. To add your first property, add your first argument to the constructor then press @a. To add more properties, add them to your constructor and press @b. For those interested, the second macro ensures that your properties are ordered as expected.

Looking for more? Check out my dotfiles for other efficiency boosts in your vim productivity.