Question

I’m currently using closepairs for my auto-closing needs, and it works pretty well. However, there is one caveat — apostrophes. Don’t get me wrong, I need apostrophes closed all the time. I don’t want to just disable them. But whenever I type in plain text, whenever there are any contractions (I’m, Don’t, Can’t)…these apostrophes get made.

Now I could just type to delete them as soon as they can, but doing it every time is a bit impractical.

Does anyone know how I can possibly modify the closepairs script to only autoclose single quotes/apostrophes if they are the start of a word? That is, they are preceded by a whitespace character?

Here is the current code:

inoremap <expr> " <SID>pairquotes('"')
inoremap <expr> ' <SID>pairquotes("'")
function! s:pairquotes(pair)
    let l:col = col('.')
        let l:line = getline('.')
        let l:chr = l:line[l:col-1]
        if a:pair == l:chr
            return "\<right>"
        else
            return a:pair.a:pair."\<left>"
endf

Answer 1

I don’t know closepairs, but the AutoClose – Inserts matching bracket, paren, brace or quote plugin handles this well. You’ll find a list of plugin alternatives on the Vim Tips Wiki.