More Electric Puncation

Following on from my post yesterday, here’s another quicky that I added recently. This one is shamelessly stolen from Eclipse, which has a handy option to correctly insert a semi-colon or {-bracket from deep within a conditional or similar; for example if you have,

Context ctx = ContextFactory.getContext(Context.nullContext(|))

then hitting ; straight away takes you to getContext(...);| (mercifully, it has been a while).

I was missing this in python, where it was taking me a whole extra keystroke or two, every time!, to jump to the end of the line to insert a colon. In the python mode I was using semicolon is already electric, so this time I had to advise it:

(defadvice python-indent-electric-colon (around python-electric-colon-autoplace (arg)
                                                activate)
  (if (and (looking-at ")")
           (not arg))
    (progn
      ad-do-it
      (transpose-chars 1))
    ad-do-it))

I.e. assuming we’re not inserting multiple colons, insert then transpose to leave the colon and cursor outside… but in fact, just writing this I realise I didn’t really go far enough at the time! So I’ve just updated to this version:

(defadvice python-indent-electric-colon (around python-electric-colon-autoplace (arg)
                                                activate)
  (if (and (looking-at ")")
           (not arg))
    (progn
      (move-end-of-line nil)
      ad-do-it
      (newline-and-indent))
    ad-do-it))

Insert correctly, indent, then ready to keep going on a new line: much more efficient!