Vim magic closing bracket

Question

It would be great in vim if I could type ] (or some other character, maybe <C-]>) and have it automatically insert whichever bracket properly closes the opening bracket. Eg. if I have this in my buffer:

object(function(x) { x+[1,2,3

And I press ]]], the characters ]}) would be inserted. How might one accomplish this this?

Answer 1

Here's a sketch of what you probably wanted. The builtin functions searchpair and searchpairpos are of enormous help for various text editing tasks :)

" Return a corresponding paren to be sent to the buffer
function! CloseParen()
    let parenpairs = {'(' : ')',
                   \  '[' : ']',
                   \  '{' : '}'}

    let [m_lnum, m_col] = searchpairpos('[[({]', '', '[\])}]', 'nbW')

    if (m_lnum != 0) && (m_col != 0)
        let c = getline(m_lnum)[m_col - 1]
        return parenpairs[c]
    endif
    return ''
endfun

To use it comfortably, make an imap of it:

imap <C-e> <C-r>=CloseParen()<CR>

Edit: over-escaped the search regexp so \ got included in the search. One less problem now.