On Jul 26, 2007, at 7:14 PM, Chris Muller wrote:

>> What drives me nuts about them is that they impede the default
>> behavior for typing when you already have a selection - deleting the
>> selection and replacing it with what you type. If what you type
>> happens to start with $(, you get very different behavior that if it
>> starts with something else.
>
> No it doesn't.  You have a selection, you want to replace it with
> other text that begins with a parenthesis.  So you type the
> parenthesis and the selected text is surrounded by parentheses, but
> the text remains selected, so just keep typing, therefore the text is
> then replaced with what you type.
>
> Granted, it gives you the closing parenthesis too, but how often do
> you want an opening without a closing?

Whenever you already have one. That seems to happen to me fairly  
often. The other annoying thing about it is that it breaks the  
behavior of cmd-J. Normally I can select text, type to replace it,  
then hit cmd-J a bunch of times to make similar edits. If the auto- 
parenthesis stuff is triggered that doesn't work.

This is silly because we already *have* a command to wrap selected  
text in parentheses. This breakage doesn't even save a keystroke. It  
makes a three-key combination into a two-key combination. Totally  
gratuitous.

Colin