I updated smart-snippet.el today. There're main two changes:

• The code is merged with snippet.el.
• Now you can use \ to escape and protect a character that might else be recognized as a snippet identifier.

Originally smart-snippet.el is based on snippet.el as a simple wrap. Bug I need to do some modification to the code frequently for enhancement or bug fix. So I decide to include the code of snippet.el in smart-snippet.el. Now I'll call smart-snippet.el a fork of snippet.el. Now you need only one single file -- the smart-snippet.el.

The escape character enhancement is from the need of a perl user. Perl uses a lot of punctuations, including the default snippet identifier $. The $ from Perl code and $ to build snippet may confuse Emacs. For example, suppose you are defining a snippet which will expand into:

foreach my $key (keys %HASH) {
    $value = $HASH{$key};
    # do something
}

You may want to define it like this:

(require 'cperl-mode)
(smart-snippet-with-abbrev-tables
(cperl-mode-abbrev-table)
("fh" "foreach my $key (keys %$${HASH}) {
     $>$value = $$${HASH}{$key};
     $>$. # do something
     }$>"
     'bol?))

The $$${HASH} in line 5 should be parsed as $ and $${HASH}, but in fact it is parsed as $$ and ${HASH} which is not what we want. How to protect the first $ ? Now with the new version of smart-snippet.el you can use \ to protect the following character:

(cperl-mode-abbrev-table)
("fh" "foreach my $key (keys %$${HASH}) {
     $>$value = \\$$${HASH}{$key};
     $>$. # do something
     }$>"
     'bol?))

Note the \ itself need to be escaped in a string, so we should write \\ in fact. Wish you enjoy it!