In Textmate I can wrap enclosing characters ('(', '[', '"', etc.) around text by selecting it and hitting the opening character. For example, if I select word
and hit (
, it will become (word)
. What does Emacs call this feature and how do I enable it?
For parens you can do M-(. For brackets/braces/quotes you could do:
(global-set-key (kbd "M-[") 'insert-pair)
(global-set-key (kbd "M-{") 'insert-pair)
(global-set-key (kbd "M-\"") 'insert-pair)
Note that if you don't have a region highlighted, it will just insert the pair of whatevers and put the cursor in between them. Also handy for deleting matching whatevers is
(global-set-key (kbd "M-)") 'delete-pair)
EDIT:
Good point in the comments about overriding backward-paragraph
. You could bind it to C-{, which might interfere with something in a major mode. insert-pair
takes the last key and does a lookup to see what pair to insert, so if you don't want to bind it to something-{ you could bind to this function instead:
(defun my-insert-braces ()
(interactive)
(if (region-active-p)
(insert-pair 1 ?{ ?})
(insert "{}")
(backward-char)))