Highlight and surround a word with angled brackets in languages typescript and tsx

[jlarmstrongiv]

Check for existing issues

• Completed

Describe the feature

I would like to highlight a word and press < to surround it with angled brackets, similar to how you can highlight a word and surround it with braces by pressing {.

TypeScript makes heavy use of Type<Generic>, so having that autocomplete would be nice

These settings are defined in:

• https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/blob/f60bebb93ba9cce6e17949450cdba56a1e14dc7c/crates/zed/src/languages/typescript/config.toml
• https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/blob/f60bebb93ba9cce6e17949450cdba56a1e14dc7c/crates/zed/src/languages/tsx/config.toml

And may be a relatively simple change

If applicable, add mockups / screenshots to help present your vision of the feature

No response

[jlarmstrongiv]

Related to

• Bracket pairing #4815
• JSX/HTML tag auto-close feature #5267

[Moshyfawn]

This comment contains the source links, but it is already a language-dependent feature.

You can open a markdown file right now and press shift-< or shift-{ with some text selected to see it in effect.

[jlarmstrongiv]

@Moshyfawn that’s a great feature! I noticed it worked in markdown, but not typescript, tsx, or astro. Is there a way to enable that language-dependent feature in other languages?

[notpeter]

Hi @jlarmstrongiv. I dug into this. This appears to be controlled by the close = true line for < > in the config.toml brackets section for each language. For example compare typescript to markdown:

zed/crates/languages/src/typescript/config.toml

Line 10 in c20a1ee

{ start = "<", end = ">", close = false, newline = true, not_in = ["string", "comment"] },

zed/crates/languages/src/markdown/config.toml

Line 9 in c20a1ee

{ start = "<", end = ">", close = true, newline = true },

Currently this setting controls two behaviors:

1. Nothing selected: Inserts closing > after you type <
2. Something selected: Wraps selection in < and > when you type <.

This means if we enable the behavior we're looking for (great!) we also get autoclosing <> (not great), because then any expression with a less than < operator will get an extraneous closing tag.

I'll leave this open as an enhancement request. In the future we may to support enabling the second behavior without the first, but at the moment that's where we're at.

You can see this behavior by building from source with the following diff:

diff --git a/crates/languages/src/typescript/config.toml b/crates/languages/src/typescript/config.toml
index ca115622c..2fdc007ec 100644
--- a/crates/languages/src/typescript/config.toml
+++ b/crates/languages/src/typescript/config.toml
@@ -7,7 +7,7 @@ brackets = [
     { start = "{", end = "}", close = true, newline = true },
     { start = "[", end = "]", close = true, newline = true },
     { start = "(", end = ")", close = true, newline = true },
-    { start = "<", end = ">", close = false, newline = true, not_in = ["string", "comment"] },
+    { start = "<", end = ">", close = true, newline = true, not_in = ["string", "comment"] },
     { start = "\"", end = "\"", close = true, newline = false, not_in = ["string"] },
     { start = "'", end = "'", close = true, newline = false, not_in = ["string", "comment"] },
     { start = "`", end = "`", close = true, newline = false, not_in = ["string"] },

[connortsui20]

@notpeter is this behavior still the case or has it been updated now? For example, in the markdown config we have some set to false:

brackets = [
    { start = "{", end = "}", close = true, newline = true },
    { start = "[", end = "]", close = true, newline = true },
    { start = "(", end = ")", close = true, newline = true },
    { start = "<", end = ">", close = true, newline = true },
    { start = "\"", end = "\"", close = false, newline = false },
    { start = "'", end = "'", close = false, newline = false },
    { start = "`", end = "`", close = false, newline = false },
]

But when I try highlight and surround every one of these characters I always get the surround behavior. I can't actually find any PRs that change this though...

Version:

Zed: v0.168.0 (Zed Dev 7913b6a5a2984a8fdbc196d103109c812dba3c03)