Is there an extension or mode in Emacs similar to surround.vim?

Question

Surround.vim is a nifty vim extension that allows you to surround blocks of text with , brackets, braces, and pretty much any arbitrary "surround" character. It supports paragraph and word surround, but I frequently use it in visual mode. I'm playing around with Emacs and wondering if there's something similar; something that will let me highlight a region and then have the marked region (or rectangle) enclosed with braces, brackets or tags.

Answer 1

So you want to select a region or similar and then make a box around it like a various modes do for comments? I believe emacs-wiki (http://www.emacswiki.org/) has some ascii-line art (and a figlet tool as well) that will do that. Searching for box, quite, line art ...

############################
#                           #
# I AM REGION, WE ARE  MANY #
#                           #
############################

Answer 2

Maybe wrap-region is what you need.

Answer 3

Don't know of any way of doing that in Emacs, not even with a module.

My Elisp is a little rusty, buy here's a simple function that will enclose the current region (marked text) or word with quotes ("):

(defun insert-quotes ()
  "Inserts quotes (\") around the current region or work."
  (interactive)
  (let (start end bounds)
    (if (and transient-mark-mode mark-active)
        (setq start (region-beginning) 
              end (region-end))
      (progn
        (setq bounds (bounds-of-thing-at-point 'symbol))
        (setq start (car bounds) 
              end (cdr bounds))))
    (goto-char start)
    (insert "\"")
    (goto-char (+ end 1))
    (insert "\"")))

Answer 4

I don't think there is anything built in for tags, but for parens you can do M-(. For brackets/braces/quotes you could do:

(global-set-key (kbd "M-[") 'insert-pair)
(global-set-key (kbd "M-{") 'insert-pair)
(global-set-key (kbd "M-\"") 'insert-pair)

Note that if you don't have a region highlighted, it will just insert the pair of whatevers and put the cursor in between them. Also handy for deleting matching whatevers is

(global-set-key (kbd "M-)") 'delete-pair)

If you want to insert tag pairs, it's some simple elisp:

(defun my-insert-tags (tag)
  (interactive "sTag: ")
  (if (region-active-p)
      (let ((beg (region-beginning)))
        (save-excursion
          (goto-char (region-end))
          (insert "</" tag ">")
          (goto-char beg)
          (insert "<" tag ">")))
    (insert "<" tag ">")
    (save-excursion
      (insert "</" tag ">"))))

Answer 5

Yes, there is a clone of surround.vim, as of 1 week ago: http://github.com/timcharper/vimpulse-surround.el

It requires vimpulse, which requires vim. It implements much of surround.vim's functionality.