Automatically insert a matching brace in Vim

Question

I spend way too much time fumbling around because Vim doesn\'t handle closing braces like most IDEs do. Here\'s what I want to happen:

Type this:

Answer 1

As you'll see in the wikia tip: there are many solutions to this recurrent question (I even have mine).

That is if you limit yourself to bracket pairs. Here you are in the context of a control statement. You're thus more likely to find snippet systems that will not expect you to type the ") {" when typing an "if" statement. Vim shortcut tend to be shorter from what I read in your question. Here again there are a lot of choices, you'll find most likely snipmate, and may be my C&C++ suite.

Answer 2

For anyone that runs across this like I did, and was looking for something more recently updated than AutoClose: delimitMate I have found to be, not only a preferable solution to AutoClose, behavior wise, but also in active development. According to vim.org, AutoClose has not been updated since 2009.

Answer 3

I have tried different plugins but I found most accurate and most easy to use auto-pairs. It is really intuitive and when you install it you get what you've expected out of the box.

Answer 4

I've always preferred something like what sublime text does where it appends the closing brace as the next character, so I added the following to my .vimrc:

inoremap (  ()<ESC>hli

which moves the cursor to between the two braces.

Answer 5

You do not need a special plugin to do this - but it is a two-step process.

First, add the following to your .vimrc to eat the triggering character:

" eat characters after abbreviation
function! Eatchar(pat)
    let c = nr2char(getchar(0))
    return (c =~ a:pat) ? '' : c
endfunction

and then add this abbreviation to your .vimrc:

inoreabbr <silent> { {
      \<cr><space><space>
      \<cr><esc>0i}<esc>k$i<c-r>=Eatchar('\m\s\<bar>\r')<cr>

The \ at the start of lines two and three is just a line continuation character. You could have done this all on one line, however and i added it so that i could spread the abbreviation out in a way that mirrors the output you're looking for -- just so things are a little more intuitive.

Answer 6

A solution for braces, brackets and parenthesis with tab in between.

" Automatically closing braces
inoremap {<CR> {<CR>}<Esc>ko<tab>
inoremap [<CR> [<CR>]<Esc>ko<tab>
inoremap (<CR> (<CR>)<Esc>ko<tab>

Result:

function() {
  |
}