Saturday 28 September 2024


Update regarding quotes around active region
============================================

This week I wrote a short phlog post about the ease in Emacs of
surrounding an active region with quotes [1].

Today, defanor was so kind to remind me that this is not the default
Emacs behavior. A short test using `emacs -Q' (which starts Emacs
without any user configuration) confirmed this.

Easy surrounding a region
-------------------------
The behavior I described is as follows:

* select text to create a region, f.e., use C-M-SPACE once or
  more times to select some words
* type a double quote (")  

and Emacs will surround the region with double quotes.

Electric pair
-------------
Emacs in the default config does not work like this. It will just
put a double quote at the position of point. You need to enable
`electric-pair-mode' for this.

Add the following to your Emacs init file, like ~/.emacs:

    (electric-pair-mode t)

You can fine tune the working by adding an expression to the
init file, like;

    (setq electric-pair-pairs '(
                                (?\{ . ?\})
                                (?\( . ?\))
                                (?\[ . ?\])
                                (?\" . ?\")
                                ))

To see the documentation of electric-pair-mode, issue
the command `C-h f' followed by `electric-pair-mode',

Have fun!

[1]: gopher://box.matto.nl/0/til-setting-quotes-around-active-region.txt


Last edited: $Date: 2024/09/28 19:22:04 $