Well, if you have some programming knowledge and the gumption, you could take the two extensions suggested by Wanderer and use them as guidelines to create your own...
Instead of bumping this thread, the time over the past month could have been better spent to learn how to code your own side panel or hacking an existing add-on to meet your needs.
the time over the past month was distributed over a full-time job, freelance work and bringing up my baby son, among other things - but thanks for your input, lech.
i did just that and then throwed it away. you will have ur snippets list on the side, you click on the snippet and it sends a code to the textarea. and also highlights and moves ur cursor to the things you have to edit. the idea was to use the snippets to better post vanilla code on this forum. the code was taken from Mootools forum (using postEditor 2 http://icebeat.bitacoras.com/mootools/posteditor/)