Question

I want to use Emacs for simple text annotation. Is there a command which surrounds a selected region of text with brackets or other characters?

Answer 1

I don’t know if there is a standard emacs command to do this, but this one should do the trick:

(defun surround-brackets ()
  "Surround current region with brackets"
  (interactive)
  (when (use-region-p)
    (save-excursion
      (let ((beg (region-beginning))
            (end (region-end)))
        (goto-char end)
        (insert "]")
        (goto-char beg)
        (insert "[")))))

EDIT As noted in the comments, this question proposes the following solution, which is much simpler but requires you to use a key binding ending with [

(global-set-key (kbd "M-[") 'insert-pair)