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honestly i was just very bored and didn't want to go to bed so i wrote this

pre-development

i was on the c/c++ help server on discord
trying to help people then someone ran the /howto Choosing an IDE/Editor command
i noticed micro was on a the terminal editors list i went to check it out for fun
then i notice it had autopairs which were something i hated from vscode(because they were so bad like why do you close the pair for me if i have to press it to exit out of it)
i then realised how helpful they can be

development

i ddg'd "vim brackets" hoping for a plugin but i found a stackoverflow question with an answer that was in vanilla vim
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/21316727/automatic-closing-brackets-for-vim
the answer was pretty barebones it had weird cursor movement and freezing that was very annoying
but then i said since the answer is so close to what i want why not try to improve it and learn plugin development on the way

the problems

  1. when writing {;} the cursor freezes (also happeneding with expanding the {} pair)
  2. when expanding the {} the cursor moves 2 times and also switches to normal mode the first issue was very easy to fix by mapping the semicolon/return key
    the second issue took 1.5~ days of searching throught (n)vim docs
    i settled on not relying on any key presses and fully using the nvim-api
    this made the cursor only move on command and stay in insert mode (important for statuslines)

what to learn

  1. when writing something that needs low-level control never rely on highlevel-builtins,
    like in my case the problem was already solved i just need more control to make it seemless
  2. never do logic in your head alone, always use paper as it makes every variable/step much easier to access,
    this would have probably made the problem solved in 2 days instead of 3
  3. never to rush to test code, it's always a good idea to reread the code at least once before testing it
  4. trying to make something perfect may not always be a bad idea

the nvim-autopairs situation

since i have basically fixed all cursor issues in nvim-autopairs the only advantage this plugin has now is it doesn't leave insert mode which doesn't update lualine diagnostics

the end

so yeah that's the story of how i hacked in an autopairs plugin in 3 days