electric pair of any length, using AUCTex

Question

According to https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/AutoPairs the package smartparens supports an electric pair of any length for example \{.

My question about the possibility that the built-in electric-pair-mode can do it. I tried this without success:

(add-hook 'LaTeX-mode-hook
              (lambda ()
                (define-key LaTeX-mode-map "\\{" 'electric-pair)))

Answer 1

AUCTeX has a bultin support for pairing braces, and \{...\} is in the default set of supported braces. In order to enable this feature, just set LaTeX-electric-left-right-brace to non nil, either with customize interface (M-x customize-variable RET LaTeX-electric-left-right-brace RET) or by adding the following line to your init file:

(setq LaTeX-electric-left-right-brace t)

This is much more advanced than any other generic mode for pairing braces, because it is able to do something like this:

\Bigl\{  →  \Bigl\{\Bigr\}