Bracket selected text in Emacs

Question

I want to use Emacs for simple text annotation. Is there a command which surrounds a selected region of text with brackets or other characters?

possible duplicate of [Wrapping selecting text in enclosing characters in Emacs](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2951797/wrapping-selecting-text-in-enclosing-characters-in-emacs) — phils, Mar 14 '12 at 21:06
Agreed. I'll delete this question shortly. Thank you for the link. — Matthew Piziak, Mar 15 '12 at 03:45
I can't delete the question as answers exist, but I've flagged it as an exact duplicate. — Matthew Piziak, Mar 18 '12 at 20:29

event_jr · Answer 1 · 2012-03-15T01:07:06.453

4

The most structured and flexible way to do this is with autopair. I would say it has become the canonical solution for inserting paired delimiters and wrapping content in paired delimiters.

Joao (autopair's author) has also written yasnippet, which is a very popular templating library in Emacs. yasnippet can be used to wrap region in arbitrary text.

Both libraries model their behaviour on Textmate.

edited Mar 15 '12 at 01:07

answered Mar 15 '12 at 00:09

event_jr

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score 2 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 10:32

I don't know if there is a standard emacs command to do this, but this one should do the trick:

(defun surround-brackets ()
  "Surround current region with brackets"
  (interactive)
  (when (use-region-p)
    (save-excursion
      (let ((beg (region-beginning))
            (end (region-end)))
        (goto-char end)
        (insert "]")
        (goto-char beg)
        (insert "[")))))

EDIT As noted in the comments, this question proposes the following solution, which is much simpler but requires you to use a key binding ending with [

(global-set-key (kbd "M-[") 'insert-pair)

Bracket selected text in Emacs

2 Answers2