Keyboard shortcut to expand code snippets in JupyterLab - jupyter-notebook

Question

Does anyone know how to make a shortcut that would paste a certain code to the selected cell or expand a snippet into a chunk of code?
For example I would like to fill a cell with a list of useful imports when pressing something like Ctrl+Shift+M. This would expand the cell content to:
import numpy as np
import pandas as pd
(...) .
Optionally this could work also like text completion tools available in some IDEs. For example when I write something like:
;imp + TAB .
it would expand into the same list as above.
Any ideas how this could be defined in JupyterLab?
I saw this answer, but it does not work for me (returning javascript error)

Answer 1

In JupyterLab 2.1+ you can add a shortcut to insert a snippet using the following settings:
{
"shortcuts": [
{
"command": "apputils:run-first-enabled",
"selector": "body",
"keys": ["Accel Shift M"],
"args": {
"commands": [
"console:replace-selection",
"fileeditor:replace-selection",
"notebook:replace-selection",
],
"args": {"text": "import numpy as np\nimport pandas as pd\n"}
}
}
]
}
For more detailed instruction see my new answer to the question you linked.
Another option is to use one of the code snippet extensions for JupyterLab:
jupyterlab-code-snippets from CalPoly
jupyterlab-snippets from QuantStack
elyra-code-snippet-extension from Elyra IBM team (with multiple contributions from the CalPoly team)

Answer 2

For emmet-style expansion of snippets in IPython, you can use:
from IPython import get_ipython
def import_completer(ipython, event):
return [
'import numpy as np\nimport pandas as pd\n',
'import tensorflow as tf\nimport autokeras as ak\n'
]
ipython = get_ipython()
ipython.set_hook('complete_command', import_completer, re_key='.*imp')