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

smartparens keeps your parenthesis in balance by automatically 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.

Smartparens and symbol balancing/highlighting

Smartparents helps speed up typing and reducing errors due to unmatched symbols. For most symbols in most modes when you type an opening parenthesis then a matching is created.

So if you type ( then a matching ) is created too.

If you want to surround some existing text with a symbol pair, then simply highlight the text and press the opening symbol (Evil Insert mode or Holy mode).

A closing symbol is also highlighted when the cursor is at the opening symbol.

Spacemacs also highlights the surrounding symbols, including any parents. So if you are in a nested list, (parent code (nested code)), then if the cursor is on the nested code, both nested & parent symbols are highlighted.

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)

Disable / temporarily skip using Smartparens