Electric Punctuation in Emacs

Funnily enough, the idea for this Emacs hack comes from my smart-phone keyboard.

The awkward nature of pecking at glass, with no tactile feedback, also means that there is a certain necessity for invention in order to recapture the usability of a regular keyboard, and some nice ideas come out of it. Some of these make use of the different nature of the surface itself, such as “swipe” typing, while others might provide a greater efficiency (in the average case), such as automatically inserting punctuation, aggressive history-based auto-completion, etc.

I swear by SwiftKey keyboard, and it has been worth every one of the five dollars I think I spent on it — in fact of all the examples I just provided they actually implement all of them (now that they are developing swipe typing as well).

The other day at work, at a regular keyboard, I realised I was actually missing one feature in particular, but luckily since I was in Emacs it only took 10 minutes to implement! That particular feature was the way punctuation is correctly inserted in SwiftKey; if you choose an auto-completion it will also insert a space, for example leaving you with “word |” (where | is the cursor; note the trailing space). However, if you then type a comma it is inserted in the correct place: “word, |”.

Basically, you never have to think about punctuation or spacing too much, as it just works. Here was the result of my procrastination:¹

(defun mh/electric-punctuation ()
  "Tidy up whitespace around punctuation: delete any preceding
  whitespace and insert one space afterwards.  Idea stolen from
  the SwiftKey android keyboard."
  (interactive)
  (when (looking-back "\s+" nil t)
    (delete-region (match-beginning 0) (match-end 0)))
  (call-interactively 'self-insert-command)
  (just-one-space))

In other words (assuming this function is triggered by punctuation), if there is some preceding space then delete it, insert the original character, and add a space afterwards.

Then to trigger this whenever I type a comma, semicolon, or period within regular text, I add it to the base text-mode hook:

(dolist (punc '(?, ?\; ?.))
  (define-key text-mode-map `[,punc] 'mh/electric-punctuation))

I will admit that it is taking me a little getting used to (it turns out I have ingrained habits of typing punctuation+space, resulting in lots of double-spacing!), and there’s room for improvement. In particular, I suspect it needs a special case to handle numbers (you don’t want “3.14” to end up as “3. 14”). I really appreciate SwiftKey for the way they continually sand down corners, and there are no doubt lots of corner-cases remaining here. Still, it was the sort of easy-to-implement idea that I love about Emacs!