Close brackets and braces easily with AutoPairs

Have got to recommend TextMate

FYI, lakiolen, Emacs can indeed do the same kind of thing, depending on the major mode that you're in. The Ruby mode (with ruby-electric) is actually quite good.

That said, I agree with you about TextMate. Even after using Emacs for almost 15 years, I'm very happy with TextMate. It's a joy to use.

Even better yet, use Peter Maurer's Textpander, which is already a Universal Binary. It installs as a Preference Pane and can do a lot more than just balance brackets. Enter any pre-configured text string to trigger a different string. I have it set up to balance all manner of parentheses, brackets, braces, HTML tags, as well as print formatted date and time strings, snippets of code, and anything else I used to type over and over. It's truly indispensable once you get hooked. Oh, and it's donation-ware, so pay what you think it's worth.

http://www.petermaurer.de/nasi.php?section=textpander

Oops my post got eaten by the database, here it is:

Dreamweaver will auto-close your current HTML tag once you type </.

As for closing parens and braces, I don't need an auto close feature. I've been programming long enough to close them without thinking. I very rarely have something blow up because of a missing paren or brace. It's usually something much worse.

Dreamweaver 8 will auto-close your current HTML tag once you type '

This is cool... but it would be awesome if it could close one's html tags too. Something like that must exist. Does anyone have any ideas?

I've gotten so used to TextMate autoclosing parens, braces, brackets and quotes that it irks me that emacs(vi, whathaveyou) doesn't.

This is perfect! I can't wait to use it.

Or you could, you know, use Textmate.