In my recent article on removing paired delimiters, I mentioned that I kind of miss Vim’s surround.vim experience in Emacs. Well, it turns out someone has done something about it – surround.el brings the core ideas of surround.vim to native Emacs, without requiring Evil mode.

surround.vim (and similar plugins like mini.surround in Neovim) are some of my favorite Vim packages. The idea is so simple and so useful that it feels like it should be a built-in. So I’m happy to see someone took the time to port that beautiful idea to Emacs.

The Core Ideas of surround.vim

For those who haven’t used surround.vim, the concept is straightforward. You have a small set of operations for working with surrounding characters – the delimiters that wrap some piece of text:

  • Delete surrounding pair: ds( removes the parentheses around point
  • Change surrounding pair: cs(" changes parens to quotes
  • Add surrounding pair: ys + motion + character wraps text with a delimiter

That’s basically it. Three operations, consistent keybindings, works everywhere regardless of file type. The beauty is in the uniformity – you don’t need different commands for different delimiters, and you don’t need to think about which mode you’re in.

surround.el in Practice

surround.el is available on MELPA and the setup is minimal:

(use-package surround
  :ensure t
  :bind-keymap ("M-'" . surround-keymap))

You bind a single keystroke (M-' in this example) to surround-keymap, and that gives you access to all the operations through a second keystroke. Here are the commands available in the keymap:

Key Operation
s Surround region/symbol at point
d Delete surrounding pair
c Change pair to another
k Kill text inside pair
K Kill text including pair
i Mark (select) inside pair
o Mark including pair

There are also shortcuts for individual characters – pressing an opening delimiter (like () after the prefix does a mark-inner, while pressing the closing delimiter (like )) does a mark-outer.

A Short Walkthrough

Let’s see how this works in practice. Starting with the word Hello (with point somewhere on it):

Surround – M-' s " wraps the symbol at point with quotes:

Hello  →  "Hello"

Change – M-' c " ( changes the surrounding quotes to parens:

"Hello"  →  (Hello)

Mark inner – M-' i ( selects just the text inside the parens:

(|Hello|)    ;; "Hello" is selected

Mark outer – M-' o ( (or M-' )) selects the parens too:

|( Hello)|   ;; "(Hello)" is selected

Delete – M-' d ( removes the surrounding parens:

(Hello)  →  Hello

Kill – M-' k ( kills the text inside the pair (leaving the delimiters gone too), while M-' K ( kills everything including the delimiters.

Inner vs. Outer

Like surround.vim, surround.el distinguishes between “inner” (just the content between delimiters) and “outer” (content plus the delimiters themselves). The i and k commands operate on inner text, o and K on outer.

There’s also an “auto” mode – the default for i and k – that behaves as inner when you type an opening character and outer when you type a closing character. So M-' ( marks inner, M-' ) marks outer. Handy shortcut if your fingers remember it (I’m still building the muscle memory).

One caveat: auto mode can’t distinguish inner from outer for symmetric pairs like quotes (", '), since the opening and closing character are the same. In those cases it defaults to inner.

How It Differs from Vim

The biggest difference is in how you surround text. In Vim, surround.vim uses motions – ysiw( means “surround inner word with parens.” In Emacs, surround.el operates on the active region or the symbol at point. So the typical workflow is: select something, then M-' s (.

This actually pairs beautifully with expreg (which I wrote about recently). Use expreg to incrementally select exactly the text you want, then M-' s to wrap it. It’s a different rhythm than Vim’s motion-based approach, but once you get used to it, it feels natural.

The other operations (d, c, k, i, o) work similarly to their Vim counterparts – you invoke the command and then specify which delimiter you’re targeting.

When to Use It

surround.el fills a specific niche:

  • Using electric-pair-mode? Then surround.el is an excellent complement. electric-pair-mode handles auto-pairing when you type delimiters, but offers nothing for removing, changing, or wrapping existing text with delimiters. surround.el fills exactly that gap.

  • Using smartparens? You probably don’t need surround.el – smartparens already has sp-unwrap-sexp, sp-rewrap-sexp, and friends. The overlap is significant, and adding another package on top would just be confusing.

  • Using paredit? Same story for Lisp code – paredit has you covered with paredit-splice-sexp, paredit-wrap-round, and so on. But if you want the surround experience in non-Lisp buffers, surround.el is a good pick.

My current setup is paredit for Lisps, electric-pair-mode for everything else, and I’m adding surround.el to complement the latter. Early days, but it feels right.

Wrapping Up

If you’ve ever wondered whether some Vim feature you miss exists in Emacs – the answer is always yes. It’s Emacs. Of course someone has written a package for it. Probably several, in fact… Admittedly, I discovered surround.el only when I had decided to port surround.vim to Emacs myself. :D

That’s all I have for you today. Keep hacking!