Easy access to small snippets of code you often need, but putting them in their own library would be crazy.

• Opening a file / db connection
• parsing xml/json/… ,
• template for unit tests,
• import and initialization of framework at work.

Depending on the IDE snippets can also move parts of the code around:

• variable.notnull -> if (variable != null) {… }
• “text %s”.format -> String.format(“text %s”,…)