[racket-dev] Survey for DrRacket users related to automatic parentheses behavior

If you can, I think it would be a good idea to remove the paren pair if the
user deletes the opening paren he just typed by mistake. Undo should do the
same (which apparently it does not currently; missing
'begin/end-edit-sequence' ?).

Laurent


On Fri, Nov 23, 2012 at 1:20 AM, Nadeem Abdul Hamid <nadeem at acm.org> wrote:

> Hello all,
>
> I've been discussing with Robby a possible improvement of DrRacket's
> "automatic parentheses" behavior and would like to get a sense of others'
> general opinion about this. What follows is a description of my proposal
> and then some concrete questions.
>
> ;;
> The idea is to have DrRacket automatically skip over
> automatically-inserted closing parens if the user types one while the
> cursor is right in front of one. (The Eclipse Java IDE does this with
> various types of braces and parens, and in the past I've found this very
> nice and have observed others (my students) interact well with such a
> feature.)
>
> A concrete example: suppose you are in the process of typing the
> expression "(+ 4 (- 1 2) 3)". After you type the first opening
> parentheses and the characters following it up to the "2", the expression
> in the editor looks like:
>   (+ 4 (- 1 2|))
> where the | represents the cursor's position. Note the two
> automatically-inserted closing parens that are after the cursor right now. With
> the current implementation, you have to then use the right arrow key to
> make the cursor skip past the first auto-inserted ")" and then you can
> type "3". However, that really disrupts the typing process because even
> if you don't type a ) as a habit and then realize you have to delete the
> extra one, you still have to lift and move your finger to the arrow keys
> area of the keyboard or type some other key combination to skip the
> cursor forward.
>
> My proposal would be to have it so that if you type ")" in the editor
> state above, it becomes:
>   (+ 4 (- 1 2)|)
> and now you continue typing a space and the 3. Of course, the same thing
> should apply for other types of parens - ( [ { etc.
>
> I don't know about others, but I actually get annoyed with the curent
> automatic parens feature to the point of disabling it. That is, I like
> the auto-parens feature not because it relieves me from having to type
> closing parentheses - I don't mind that, and I actually tend to do that
> automatically as I'm typing expressions; but the benefit is that it always
> keeps parens balanced while I'm still in the middle of typing an
> expression. However, with the current behavior, it tends to make me type
> extra closing parentheses and have to go back and delete parens to balance
> things up again.
>
> ;;
> So, the questions:
>
> 1. Do you use the automatic parentheses feature of DrRacket?
>
> 2a. If yes, does the proposal above resonate well with you?
> 2b. And, do you think this "smart skipping" of auto-inserted closing
> parentheses should become the intrinsic behavior of the automatic
> parentheses mode, or should it be a separate preference? (i.e. have two
> preference options - the current automatic parentheses one and then a
> subordinate option that enables/disables this skipping over of
> auto-inserted closing parentheses as the user types them)
>
> 3. If your answer to #1 is "No", why not? (Is it because you find its
> current behavior awkward in some way?)
>
> Thanks,
>
> nadeem
>
>
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>   Racket Developers list:
>   http://lists.racket-lang.org/dev
>
>
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