On Fri, Sep 14, 2018 at 6:46 PM e2qb2a44f@prolan-power.hu wrote:
For example, in the case of parentheses and fu(8); If one enables the "auto-close opening parenthesis" feature, then:
Instead of typing f u ( 8 ) ; ENTER he/she have to type f u ( 8 ARROW_RIGHT ; ENTER ?
Is this all the gain? (The same number of keystrokes..) (Or I am missing something?)
I haven't used Geany in a while, but I doubt you are missing anything. It's quite tricky to get this feature really right, and I still haven't found any editor that does it the way I would like.
Today, you can sort of get closer with some editors, such as Sublime Text or Visual Studio Code. These will let you "type over" the closing bracket, so it's the *exact* same keystrokes that you would have typed without autoclose (in my opinion, much better than having to use arrow keys).
So the point of autoclosing brackets then is just to make sure you don't *forget* to close the bracket, rather than really saving keystrokes. See my answer to a VS Code question here:
https://stackoverflow.com/a/46370345/95852
But even this is not good for me, because (at least in the case of VS Code), it interacts with autoindentation to put the closing bracket out of reach:
https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/34861
When that happens, there is nothing you can do to get past the automatically generated closing bracket with normal typing; you have no choice but to use arrow or mouse navigation.
So if you prefer typing normally, without jumping back and forth between arrow keys and home row, then you are probably better served leaving this feature off.
John Y.