Sublime Text 2: Show Scope Name of Current Document

TL;DR

In the ST2 console, run:

print(view.syntax_name(view.sel()[0].begin()))

The Whole Enchelada

Snippets in Sublime Text 2 (or any text editor, really) are pretty awesome, especially since you can limit which scope in which you want the snippet to be usable/tab-triggerable.

While I've always loved the idea of limiting the scope of my tab-triggered snippets, it hasn't always been that practical to me, since I don't exactly maintain a mental storehouse of the actual scope names of the different file formats I use, and scope names can't always be easily inferred by their respective file formats (i.e. "text.html" versus "source.css"). Not only that, but Google surprisingly turned up very sparse and non-straight-forward results as far as an easily digestible online reference. You could look in ST2's syntax definition files to find the corresponding scope name, but that is obviously far less than ideal.

I stumbled across a command for the ST2 console that conveniently outputs the scope name of the currently-selected tab, and I turned it into a snippet. You can use it as-is, which simply renders a set of "instructions" (if you can call them that) to wherever you type the snippet's tab trigger, or you can just pull out the command itself. In its current incarnation, it will render with the command itself highlighted for easy copy and pasting into the console.

Without further ado:

<snippet>
  <content><![CDATA[

    1. View > Show Console (^`)
    2. ${1:print(view.syntax_name(view.sel()[0].begin()))}

  ]]></content>
  <description>Display console command for showing scope name of current document</description>
  <tabTrigger>showscope</tabTrigger>
</snippet>

Happy snippet-ing!