Using electric-pair on apple keyboards

Question

BACKGROUND:

I have started to use emacs with a macbook and the first difficulty was that the meta keys are used for emacs things, where there would otherwise be used for special characters, such as: [, ], |, {, }, ...

[Not that it changes much, but just to mention it, my macbook has a German keyboard]

To solve this I had defined my own functions for each special character, which lives in my .emacs file. For example, to insert a pipe:

(defun nwm/open-curley-bracket ()
  "A custom function to insert an opening curley bracket as the mac key-bind for it doesn't work within emacs."
  (interactive)
  (insert "\{"))
(global-set-key (kbd "M-8") 'nwm/open-curley-bracket)

QUESTION:

I would like to use electric-pairs to auto-complete these special characters, meaning when I type { I expect both braces to appear {} with the cursor left between them. The electric pairs mode works nicely for the special characters like normals brackets () that I do not need to remap to my keyboard, however it doesn't work for my new keybound characters like the pipe above.

I have tried setting the required special characters with less convoluted methods, e.g.:

(define-key global-map (kbd "M-8") "{")

... this still doesn't work for me.

I don't know much about Lisp, so if anybody can interpret the colde bhind electric-pairs to find the cause of the problem, please do! http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/ElectricPair

Has anybody got a work-around or a different solution?

Answer 1

Personally, I don't like the default way Emacs on OS X use the modifier keys. I have the following in my init file, it places meta on Cmd and restore Alt to the normal OS X behaviour to access special keys. This way it just work with electric-pair-mode and you can drop all your special functions.

(if (boundp 'ns-command-modifier)
    (setq ns-command-modifier 'meta))

(if (boundp 'ns-option-modifier)
    (setq ns-option-modifier nil))

Answer 2

electric-pair-mode uses post-self-insert-hook to do the pairing. Inserting a string into the buffer with insert is not going to trigger the post-self-insert-hook because you never ran self-insert-command.

Instead of using insert use execute-kbd-macro to treat the insertion as if you had pressed the key for a curly bracket.

(defun my-insert-lcurly ()
  (interactive)
  (execute-kbd-macro "{"))

Depending on your major-mode, your syntax table might not recognize certain characters as bracket pairs. The syntax for the characters you want: (, {, [, etc need to be set accordingly. For things like pipe characters, you may want to modify the value of electric-pair-pairs to include them in order the the mode to work.

Answer 3

Emacs has a whole stack of translation mechanisms going from the keyboard events it receives from the operating systems to the commands that they trigger. If you want a keychord to insert a character, the global keymap is too high level. You want one of the translation keymaps. If you want Meta+8 to always be treated as a { key, then declare the binding in key-translation-map.

(define-key key-translation-map [(meta ?8)] "{")

The fact that you expect M-8 to insert a character may indicate that your modifier setup is wrong, though. Normally, the keychord to insert { would be AltGr+8; if Emacs sees your AltGr key as Meta, you should probably instruct it otherwise.