What Is the Command to Match Brackets in Emacs

What is the command to match brackets in Emacs?

See show-paren-mode as described in 5.27 How do I show which parenthesis matches the one I'm looking at?

Matching braces in Emacs

This is actually a very standard binding: C-M-f and C-M-b to go back and forwards by default. In most modes C-M-f will take you forwards to the matching brace and C-M-b will take you backwards to the matching brace. This also works for things like quotes, pretty much the same way.

These bindings are easy to remember if you already use C-f and C-b for navigation. (If you don't, you should.) They're just like moving forward and backwards by a character lifted to moving by expression (which depends on mode).

With emacs, how to go to the pairing (balancing) parentheses

Use C-M-right and C-M-left (respectively backward-sexp and forward-sexp) to go to the beginning or the end of the current expression. This works for parenthesis pairs but also for plain words.

Emacs Brace and Bracket Highlighting?

If you're dealing with a language that supports it, give ParEdit a serious look. If you're not using with a Lisp dialect, it's not nearly as useful though.

For general brace/bracket/paren highlighting, look into highlight-parentheses mode (which color codes multiple levels of braces whenever point is inside them). You can also turn on show-paren-mode through customizations (that is M-x customize-variable show-paren-mode); that one strongly highlights the brace/bracket/paren matching one at point (if the one at point doesn't match anything, you get a different color).

my .emacs currently contains (among other things)

(require 'highlight-parentheses)

(define-globalized-minor-mode global-highlight-parentheses-mode highlight-parentheses-mode
  (lambda nil (highlight-parentheses-mode t)))

(global-highlight-parentheses-mode t)

as well as that show-paren-mode customization, which serves me well (of course, I also use paredit when lisping, but these are still marginally useful).

matching opening and closing braces in emacs

I personally like mic-paren, which has many options for customizing how to show matching parentheses, including showing you the line of the matching paren in the minibuffer when it is off-screen.

I set it up as follows:

(setq paren-dont-touch-blink t)
(require 'mic-paren)
(paren-activate)
(setq paren-match-face 'highlight)
(setq paren-sexp-mode t)

Display line of matching bracket in the minibuffer

I assume you have turned on show-paren-mode so matching parens are highlighted:

(show-paren-mode t)

Then this will show the matching line if the paren is off the screen:

(defadvice show-paren-function (after my-echo-paren-matching-line activate)
  "If a matching paren is off-screen, echo the matching line."
  (when (char-equal (char-syntax (char-before (point))) ?\))
    (let ((matching-text (blink-matching-open)))
      (when matching-text
        (message matching-text)))))

Unable to type braces and square braces in emacs

(setq mac-option-modifier nil
      mac-command-modifier 'meta
      x-select-enable-clipboard t)

This is what I use for my swedish keyboard. It even works with svorak A5, if you use it :)

How can I find missing or mismatched braces / parens in emacs?

For languages like C, C++, and Java, the command check-parens will check parens (()), brackets ([]), and braces ({}):

M-x check-parens <RET>

The point will move to a bracketing character that is unmatched, and the status line will report the problem.

It's a good idea to use this in conjunction with show-paren-mode as others have said.

How to search/replace expressions with parantheses in emacs?

You can use back references to tackle this problem. Run

M-x query-replace-regexp

and enter \\mathrm{\([\a-z0-9_ ]+\)} at the first prompt, \1 at the second prompt.

The default keybinding for query-replace-regexp is C-M-%.

The \1 is a back reference to the first parenthesized group, \([\a-z0-9_ ]+\), in the regexp to replace. This group targets the content between the curly brackets. So what you are saying is that for any occurrence of the regexp to replace you would only like to keep that content.

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More info on replacing regular expressions can be found here or in the corresponding info node of the Emacs manual.

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