In some text editors, the tab key completes a string or action for you. In Obsidian it would be fluid for this to happen:
Type a [
A closing bracket is automatically appended and the cursor remains between the brackets
The user types within the brackets
When the user is done the user can type the Tab key which places the cursor outside of the closing bracket
The same would apply to other similar auto pairing patterns, like **. “”, and so on. I believe it’s easy for the Tab key action to deviate from normal behavior by analyzing the context.
Sorry for the slight diversion of discussion, but I just realized that when Obsidian automatically pairs parentheses, brackets, asterisks, quotes, etc, you can still manually close them yourself and it will simply type right over the generated auto paired characters. Just thought I’d share that since it is somewhat relevant here. Unfortunately I couldn’t find the topic where someone like myself was a little frustrated with having to resist manually closing them on their own. Hope this helps another person with stubborn muscle memory that has yet to realize this yet.
This plugin doesn’t work for parentheses ( ) for example, as the detection requires a CodeMirror token for the environment (like “strong” for xyz, “hmd-internal-link” for [[xyz]] etc.).
Parentheses however seem to just be in the Document environment, so trying to enable tabout for parentheses using this plugin would cause any tab keypress outside of a link or “open and closed” Markdown formatting to skip to the next closing bracket, not ideal
This seems like a very basic feature to add alongside auto pair brackets. It should be a part of the core functionality IMO.
yeah, the Tabout plugin no longer works and hasn’t been updated in two years, which is a shame.
It would be great if this was just a built-in feature in Obsidian.
This thread has seen over 1K views, but not enough people are “liking” it to push it up.
Thanks for all the comments and suggestions. I am well aware of the competition for new features but this one seems like such an elementary and simple and productive feature to add as default to the app. Those who like the existing behavior, well, a preference can naturally be set for that.
The way it currently works actually seems more difficult since you have to find the arrow keys. So somehow its actually easier to just type the closing key yourself. Glad that works just fine and doesn’t add repeated end brackets. But then it makes me wonder what the original use case was for in the first place? Is it something helpful with code only? Some type of universal TAB out would make it all make sense to me though.
+1 on this: when you go to link a note via “[[”, it would be great if clicking tab on the note you’re trying to link not only filled in the rest of the title of the note, but also placed the cursor outside the closing brackets.
Thanks, WhiteNoise. That works for double bracket closures but not for single brackets. When I type a single left bracket I see the cursor is enclosed automatically by a right bracket. When I finish typing inside the two brackets and type Return, the right bracket is moved down one line (a carriage return takes place). If what you say is supposed to work for single brackets as well, I wonder then if I have a incorrect preference or setting somewhere.
