Question

I am using emacs cperl-mode. When I type

if(

it gives me the code template:

if(<cursor goes here>){
}

But I want to make it like this:

if(<cursor goes here>){
    <tab, according to the mode>
}

So after I wrote the condition inside ‘if’, I won’t need to click <End> <Enter> <tab> and will only need to click <Down arrow>.

The same method can be used for the similar cases: while, for, etc.

Answer 1

I use Yasnippet to cover this case:

YASnippet is a template system for Emacs. It allows you to type an
abbreviation and automatically expand it into function templates.
Bundled language templates includes: C, C++, C#, Perl, Python, Ruby,
SQL, LaTeX, HTML, CSS and more. The snippet syntax is inspired from
TextMate’s syntax, you can even import most TextMate templates to
YASnippet.

Your case would be just i f tab condition tab then block.

In cperl-mode you have following default templates:

eval, for, fore, if, ife, ifee, sub, unless, while, xfore, xif, xunless, xwhile

and – what’s even more awesome – you can easily create your own templates or use an existing collection of yasnippet snippets for many languages.