Make It Easy to Surround Text With Parentheses

hoji afzal 0

What do think of adding a menu item in Edit to place parentheses around selected text?

I have needed to do this a few times and found it to be a rather tedious operation when required multiple times.

Edit | Surround with Parentheses | (…), […], {…}, “…”, ‘…’

Before: Hello, world!
After: “Hello, world!”

Michael Vincent

@hoji-afzal-0

One of our esteemed colleagues @dail beat you to it:

SurroundSelection

I use this plugin all the time; stable and very useful (Windows 10, N++ 7.8.6 64-bit).

Cheers.

hoji afzal 0

@Michael-Vincent

Wow! This works easier than I thought :)

Very nice! Thanks.

Blupeterb254 B

I’ve got a question, a n00b question.

I’ve got the plug-in installed, and it is working per the instructions, but instead of surrounding each line with the character, it only surrounds the first and last character in the group.

Each line has an EOL (CR + LF) and I’ve not been able to figure this out.

The list I have has data that looks like:

*.thisfile
*.thatfile

So when I grab the text, and hit the " character, this is what happens…

“*.thisfile
*.thatfile”

Any suggestions? Thanks in advance.

Alan Kilborn

@Blupeterb254-B

It isn’t necessarily a “noob” question.

What you need to do is to make a “rectangular selection” around items that you want to surround.
You do this either by holding Alt while selecting with the mouse, or, with the keyboard, holding Shift+Alt while you cursor around with the arrows.

In reality a rectangular selection is made up of N selections, one for each line it is part of.
Because you then have N selections, when the Surround Selection functionality is invoked each of the N selections gets wrapped.

Contrast this with the single selection you had that covered multiple lines (but was still a “stream” selection). Here when you invoke the functionality of the plugin, it “surrounds” the selection, but, since there is only one selection covering multiple lines, you only get a single pair of wrapping characters.

Hope it makes sense; it is a bit wordy to explain. Or maybe that’s just me. :-)

Blupeterb254 B

Thank you for the explanation - I do get it now, while Alt-Shift to select text, it works exactly as I expect it would.

I just didn’t understand that’s what I needed to do.

This will help with adding file exclusions in FSRM.

Thank you!