[Geany-Users] Auto-close quotes and brackets

[John Yeung]

On Fri, Sep 14, 2018 at 6:46 PM <e2qb2a44f at 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.