Floating code snippets in LaTeX

Last week I decided to separate “figures” that contain diagrams, graphs and parse trees with “figures” that contained source code snippets. In LaTeX it means the former kind stays in figure environment, while the latter needs to reside within its own. I googled for solution and was quite surprised how the web was full of cluttered random hacks that were done without any understanding of TeX internals. My solution is 9 lines long, and it solves three problems: the environment itself, the list of them and referencing issues.

\usepackage{float}
\usepackage{tocloft}
\newcommand{\listofsnippetname}{List of Listings}
\newlistof{snippet}{lol}{\listofsnippetname}
\floatstyle{boxed}
\newfloat{snippet}{thp}{lol}[chapter]
\floatname{snippet}{Listing}
\newcommand{\snippetautorefname}{Listing}
\renewcommand{\thesnippet}{\thechapter.\arabic{snippet}}

The first two lines connect two packages: one for a mechanism of defining new floating object types, one for toc-ish lists. On the next two lines we define the new list — at this point the new LaTeX counter is already created but not used anywhere. floatstyle can be plain, boxed or ruled — I decided for boxed since I was using boxedminipage inside the old-style figures anyway. Then we define a new float type which fails to define a new counter and has to use the one for the list we already made, just as planned. We finish up by giving the new floating environment some names.

That’s it, we’re done. Just use \begin{snippet}…\end{snippet} and \autoref{…} as you usually would with figures and tables. I see no need to create more counters, to brutally mess with @addtoreset and theHsnippet, etc. Hacks must be simple, effective and beautiful.