Auto pair how-to

[Joshua_Stamper]

Greetings All,

I’ve searched the forum but haven’t been able to find a solution to what I’m sure is the most basic of questions concerning auto pairing:

How do you advance cursor past the auto-pair?

For example, if I want to italicize a word, I type * and get ** with a cursor between the two asterisks. So far so good. I begin typing the word, but the only way I can move to the next word is to type another *, which seems to defeat the purpose of auto-pairing because you have to type the symbol a second time to close the pair.

I love the concept of being able to quickly type parentheses, links, quotes, asterisks, and other things, but I’m sure there’s something I’m missing.

Thanks much.

[Joshua_Stamper]

(Obviously, I’m a complete newbie to Markdown…)

[darth_obsidious]

I’ve wondered this too. You can press right-arrow to get past it but that’s the same number of keystrokes. I guess it saves hunting for the symbol again.

I like highlighting a word and hitting the needed symbol once, though, and it adds it to both ends.

[looper]

Nice, I didn’t realize you could press the symbol while text is highlighted to surround the text with that formatting symbol.

[looper]

You’re not missing anything as far as I know. Other coding editors do the same thing with certain symbols, usually brackets and the like, based on what coding language the editor thinks you’re writing in. You’re right, it’s no less number of key presses. But what I think it does is, it enables you to not forget to enter the closing symbol at the end of your word or phrase.

[Joshua_Stamper]

Thanks, all. It’s helpful to know there’s not a super-obvious step I’m missing.

[looper]

Just found out there’s a Community plugin called Tabout that allows you to press the Tab key to skip to the other side of the trailing markup token. E.g. it lets you “tab out” of the second markup character (the * or _ or what have you).