autotype: Inserting Pairs
5 Inserting Matching Pairs of Characters
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Various characters usually appear in pairs. When, for example, you
insert an open parenthesis, no matter whether you are programming or
writing prose, you will surely enter a closing one later. By entering
both at the same time and leaving the cursor in between, Emacs can
guarantee you that such parentheses are always balanced. And if you
have a non-qwerty keyboard, where typing some of the stranger
programming language symbols makes you bend your fingers backwards, this
can be quite relieving too.
This is done by binding the first key (
(emacs)Rebinding) of
the pair to ‘skeleton-pair-insert-maybe’ instead of
‘self-insert-command’. The “maybe” comes from the fact that this
at-first surprising behavior is initially turned off. To enable it, you
must set ‘skeleton-pair’ to some non-‘nil’ value. And even then, a
positive argument ((emacs)Arguments) will make this key behave
like a self-inserting key ((emacs)Inserting Text).
While this breaks with the stated intention of always balancing
pairs, it turns out that one often doesn’t want pairing to occur, when
the following character is part of a word. If you want pairing to occur
even then, set ‘skeleton-pair-on-word’ to some non-‘nil’ value.
Pairing is possible for all visible characters. By default the
parenthesis ‘(’, the square bracket ‘[’, the brace ‘{’ and the pointed
bracket ‘<’ all pair with the symmetrical character, and the grave
accent ‘`’ pairs with the apostrophe ‘'’. All other characters pair
themselves. This behavior can be modified by the variable
‘skeleton-pair-alist’. This is in fact an alist of skeletons (
Skeleton Language), with the first part of each sublist matching the
typed character. This is the position of the interactor, but since
pairs don’t need the ‘str’ element, this is ignored.
Some modes have bound the command ‘skeleton-pair-insert-maybe’ to
relevant keys. These modes also configure the pairs as appropriate.
For example, when typing TeX input, you’d expect the grave accent (‘`’)
to pair with the apostrophe (‘'’), while in Shell script mode it must
pair to itself. They can also inhibit pairing in certain contexts. For
example an escaped character stands for itself.
Info Catalog
autotype: Skeleton Language
autotype: Top
autotype: Autoinserting