We are all looking for ways to increase our productivity when we’re coding and shorten the amount of time spent on a project. Spending less time usually translates into meeting the required deadlines set by your employer or client, and doing a lot more than you would usually do if you stopped every 10 minutes to look for solutions online. These snippet tools become extremely helpful especially if you’re just starting out and you have trouble remembering every piece of code you encounter online.

One of the “secrets” of any successful programmer is the snippet manager tool. There are a few free ones out there right now – stand-alone code snippet manager anyone can download and use. In combination with snippet libraries such as snipllr.com you will soon have a ton of code you can pop out at any time and make your life a whole lot easier.

Below you’ll find a selection of five code snippet managers you can download and use for free.

Snippet Manager

Snippet Manager is an extremely lightweight (no setup required) freeware utility that you can use for managing your code snippets in a variety of languages. Snippet Manager works with VB, C++, C#, Java, SQL, ASP, PHP, HTML, even COBOL, Assembler and Fortran (37 languages are supported). You can also use Snippet Manager to manage plain old ASCII text data.

The Snippet Manager

The Snippet Manager is exactly what you’d think it is – it’s an application for managing snippets. That may sound a little basic, but it’s a feature–rich application for managing and searching public snippets, which have been shared by users worldwide.

AIR Tutorials’ Snippet Manager

Snippet Manager is a desktop application built using Flex (MXML and ActionScript) for Adobe AIR.
Snippet Manager will allow you to create an unlimited number of code snippets and assign them to a category (which are also unlimited).
This application requires Adobe® AIR™ to be installed for Mac OS or Windows.

Snip-It Pro

Snip-It Pro is a code snippet manager with features designed to make you a more productive programmer. It provides a single place where you can store all the useful bits of code that you ever came across. Your favorite JavaScript functions. Tricky CSS Hacks. Useful helper Classes. Esoteric configuration xml. Complex SQL Queries. No more searching through old project source code, or wasting time googling unproven code.

QSnipps – code snippet manager tool

Stop wasting valuable time searching for re-usable pieces of code in your previous projects. Use QSnipps to store and organize all your favorite programming snippets. QSnipps is an easy to use, cross-platform code snippet manager tool that runs without a problem on Windows OS, Mac OS X or Linux OS.

Not all of these are freeware. You can download and use them for 30 days and if you like working with them you can purchase a license.