The manual says the following.
Subskeletons are inserted recursively, not once, but as often as the user enters something at the subskeletons interactor. Thus there must be a str in the subskeleton. They can also be used non-interactively, when prompt is a lisp-expression that returns successive list-elements.
(Emphasis is mine, see section Skeleton Language for more.)
Here's what this means:
By default it repeats until you hit RET or C-g:
(define-skeleton skeleton-repeat-until-tired "repeat until tired" "" ; empty top-level interactor ("Enter something here, or press %s: " ; stops on empty input string "You entered '" str "'.\n"))
To execute a subskeleton once, use ("") as the interactor:
(define-skeleton skeleton-once "executes a subskeletons once" "" ; empty top-level interactor (("") "insert stuff\n"))
This is just a special case of an interactor used to loop over several strings:
(define-skeleton skeleton-loop-1 "subskeletons as loops" "" ; empty top-level interactor (("a" "b" "c") ; list if strings, execute subskeleton once per element "str is " str "\n"))
You can compute these strings based on the context, too:
(defun my-strings () (list (format "you were at line %d" (line-number-at-pos)))) (define-skeleton skeleton-loop-2 "subskeletons as loops" "" ; empty top-level interactor `(,(my-strings) ; list if strings, execute subskeleton once per element "str is " str "\n"))
Here's one way to use this information to fix your skeleton:
(define-skeleton my-func-skeleton "func skeleton" "" (if (looking-back "\n") ;; A function at left of screen is a top level function. `((,(skeleton-read "Function name: ")) "// " str " ." \n "func " str "(" @ ") {" \n _ @ \n -1 "}") ;; Otherwise it is an anonymous function. '(("") "func () {" \n _ \n -1 "}")))
