prodissues

Electric Pair Mode In Emacs

Sun 02 October 2016 by yaniv

So far I've used TextExpander for text snippets and, well, text expansion. One of my main uses-cases is character pairings. For example, when I type " I almost always enclose it with another ".

But TextExpander is lacking in several ways:

  1. Performance - it takes a friction of a second for the expansion to happen, but it's notable, and feels like a little hang.
  2. If I delete one part of the pair, it won't remove the other.
  3. It won't work to wrap text. If I typed something, and then want to wrap it with brackets, for example, I can't select the text and type the bracket character.

In addition to the above technical shortcomings, I don't plan to keep using TextExpander in the long run. The recent move into subscription based pricing, isn't something I'm interested in. I mean, paying subscription to text snippets...?

Anyway, Emacs comes with an electric-pair-mode, which enables smart pairing. I turned it on, but out of the box it's configured to work mainly with programming major modes. I need it also in other text based modes, such as org, markdown and simple text. For example, in org I use ~ for inline code snippets, and ~ isn't paired by default. Same goes with ".

Luckily, defining more pairs is easy, through modifying the electric-pair-pairs variable.

Here's my configuration for this mode:

(electric-pair-mode 1)
(setq electric-pair-pairs '(
                            (?\ . ?\)
                            (?\ . ?\)
                            (?\( . ?\))
                            (?\{ . ?\})
                            ))

I'll add more pairs as I encounter them. Also, I'll need to learn how to add pairs for specific major modes.