Auto Pairs

Insert or delete brackets, parens, and quotes in pair: a maintained fork of jiangmiao/auto-pairs

Nvim warning

Note that this is not (yet) a statement saying nvim is unsupported. It continues having support - as long as it doesn't break built-in vimscript features. If this breaking continues, nvim will lose support when enough core features break.

---

This plugin is first and foremost a Vim plugin. Nvim support is only maintained by nvim being compatible with vim in the ways that matter - that being in the well-established vimscript functions powering the plugin.

At the time of writing of this warning, there are two major bugs introduced by nvim incompatibility with elementary and well-established Vimscript functions. One of these bugs were fixed and later regressed. The other was reported over a year ago at the time of writing,, which builds on a doc bug report written 1.5 years ago, and remains untouched in spite of being significant for plugin support.

The timeline on the regression is still unclear, but it isn't important. This is a symptom of nvim no longer maintaining compatibility with core vim features.

If you want to use this plugin with nvim, note that there can and will be bugs caused by Nvim introducing incompatibilities into well-established functions - both intentionally and accidentally. If these are breaking for your use, you can:

1. Upgrade to Vim
2. Switch to an nvim-specific plugin

Nvim is no longer a drop-in replacement for Vim, and hasn't been for quite some time. This forces a split in the Nvim and Vim plugin ecosystems as well. This is purely Nvim's fault - not for adding new features on top of Vim, but for breaking long-standing, built-in vimscript functions that have been around longer than nvim has existed.

Installation

Using a Vim package manager

NOTE: Auto-pairs currently requires at least vim 8.1 with patch 1114. See #37

There's several installation methods, and you're free to use whatever you want, but I personally cannot recommend vim-plug enough, in part because of the previous line of text. Installation, if you expect a more or less working variant, should be done with:

Plug 'LunarWatcher/auto-pairs'

You can also specify a tag, but this is no longer needed as of the release of 3.0.0.

To use experimental changes before they're deployed, use:

Plug 'LunarWatcher/auto-pairs', {'branch': 'develop'}

Note: As of 4.0.0, let g:AutoPairsCompatibleMaps = 0 is the default. Set the variable to 1 to use jiangmiao-compatible keybinds.

Using distro package managers

Note that using Vim package managers is the recommended option, as this allows for easier updates (in my biased opinion). If you still prefer, some Linux distros have packages for the plugin:

• Ubuntu, Debian, and derivatives: vim-autopairs (Package sources: Ubuntu, Debian)

Note: I do not maintain these packages.

Note to migrating users

If you're migrating from jiangmiao's version, it's highly recommended that you read :h autopairs-migrating after installing. There have been a number of breaking changes made in this fork, as well as changes to default behavior. See the migration guide for important differences that are may affect your workflow.

Running tests (not required)

Auto-pairs comes with a few tests aimed at making sure nothing accidentally regresses without manually testing everything. Tests are in the test folder, and are in the vimspec format (using themis.vim); follow its instructions to run the tests.

Some plugins may interfere with the tests and cause erroneous failures, but the CI is generally indicative of the general state of auto-pairs. If it fails locally, that may be an indication of a plugin incompatibility (though these are often possible to fix)

Versioning system (meta)

This project roughly uses semantic versioning, with the minor exception that major version bumps may not be breaking in the sense that everything breaks, but introduces a set of features that significantly changes auto-pairs' functionality.

Breaking API changes that affect code compatibility will never happen outside major version bumps (looking aside bugs). Additionally, the master branch is the main development branch and may therefore periodically break. While I do as many tests as I can before I push, there may still be bugs introduced on the main branch. If you want a stable (ish) experience, stick to tags. If you want updates when they're released, stick to the master branch.

Differences from jiangmiao

At this point, there's far too many differences to list all of them. Aside removing some variables (such as remapping <C-h>), and tweaking defaults, many additional variables have been added. Including changes by Krasjet, here's a short list of some of the things this fork does that upstream doesn't:

• Option for inserting pairs only if there's whitespace
• Option for automatic linebreaks for some openers
• Built-in support for language-specific pairs
• Option for searching for closers after space (jiangmiao always did this, Krasjet never did this)
• Option for entirely disabling jump
• Option for a pre-init hook
• Option for disabling in some directories
• Options for single-quote handling around text
• QOL improvements for matching
• Balance checks with advanced modes (See :h g:AutoPairsStringHandlingMode)
• ... Lots of bugfixes and general improvements
• Better standards
• Support and continued development :)

The entire list is too long to place in its entirety here -- the documentation should cover all the variables, so reading it should give you a complete idea of the changes.

Compatibility

Quite a lot of code compatibility was thrown out the window with a massive change that moved the plugin to be partially autoloaded. This mainly leads to improvements in terms of making it easier to customize (i.e. autopairs#AutoPairsDefine is available without an autocmd now). Additionally, it makes sure to reduce the chance of a conflict between functions.

Functionally, however, it's meant to resemble upstream as much as possible, partly to make migration less annoying for people with lots of customization.

Goals

• Improving on jiangmiao's original code
• Updating the plugin with long-requested features
• ... and with new ones.
• Increased customizability

Non-goals

• Being a drop-in snippet replacement -- use UltiSnips or lexima.vim instead.
• Supporting very old versions of Vim
• HTML support: hardcoding HTML tags works, but writing a tag autoinserter requires substantial rewrites to the core engine. Instead, may I introduce you to Tim Pope? Or alternatively alvan?

Features

• Obviously, the insertion and deletion of pairs (note that deletion is disabled by default. See :h g:AutoPairsMapBS)
• An enter mapping for pair expansion
• Quote handling aimed at avoiding accidental expansions
• The ability to ignore pair insertion unless there's a whitespace (:h autopairs-howto-whitespace-only)
• Extended balance checks
• Fast pair wrapping
• Several customisable features for various personal preferences

For more features, as well as documentation, see doc/AutoPairs.txt

Contributors

See Contributors

License

The code is licensed under the MIT license. See LICENSE.md for the full license text.