Smartparens - Writing structured text

Spacemacs uses Smartparens to help you write structured code really fast and also move expressions around. Smart parens is a newer implementation of the classic paredit package.

Hint Take a look at the smart parens readme file for instructions on how to use Smartparens (I will incorporate that information in this workshop at a later date).

Balanced parens & other characters

The simplest feature of smart parens is keeping your parenthesis in balance. This is done automatically by creating a closing paren when you type an open paren.

This also happens for other character delimiters, such as [] for vectors, {} for maps and "" for strings.

With strict mode on, then you are unable to delete any of these delimiters until they are empty. For example I could not delete any paren of the following expression until I delete the content of the expression (def brackets "They are the best")

I would have to delete the contents of this def expression before I could remove the open or close paren.

Commands Highlights

Smartparens package provides additional functions for navigating and manipulating strictly balanced expressions. Here’s a short list of some mentioned on this page, all of them (and the rest) are described in the readme file on github page.

Jump to end of expression (Vim insert mode)

Use ) to jump to the end of an expression or any other delimiter

C-q temporarily disables this feature, allowing a ) to be entered

dotspacemacs-smart-closing-parenthesis in .spacemacs controls this feature, set this to nil to switch it off.

   ;; If non-nil pressing the closing parenthesis `)' key in insert mode passes
   ;; over any automatically added closing parenthesis, bracket, quote, etc…
   ;; This can be temporary disabled by pressing `C-q' before `)'. (default nil)