A quick way to jump to outer square brackets

[matj1]

Description

I suggest that there would be keyboard commands to jump to the beginning and end of the enclosing square brackets. I present them here as Alt+Home and Alt+End, but they can change accoding to what is viable. There would be also Alt+Shift+Home and Alt+Shift+End which would move the cursor in the same way but also select the text between the old position and the new position.

I suggest that they would behave so (where the vertical bar | represents the text cursor):

• Pressing Alt+Home would move the cursor to the inner side of the innermost opening square bracket enclosing the cursor.

  #emph[some| text]

  Alt+Home →

  #emph[|some text]

• Analogically, pressing Alt+End would move the cursor to the inner side of the innermost closing square bracket enclosing the cursor.

  #emph[some| text]

  Alt+End →

  #emph[some text|]

• This would work regardless of lines.

  #quote[a wise|
  multiline quote]

  Alt+End →

  #quote[a wise
  multiline quote|]

• Nested brackets would be skipped.

  #title[title| with a #smallcaps[small capital] part]

  Alt+End →

  #title[title with a #smallcaps[small-cap] part|]

• If the cursor already is at the inner side of a square bracket, such movement in the direction of the bracket would move the cursor out of the bracket. I don't know how to word this better, but the idea is that pressing the key combination again would move the cursor to successively outer brackets.

  #title[title with a #smallcaps[|small-cap] part]

  Alt+Home →

  #title[|title with a #smallcaps[small capital] part]

• If there are no outer square brackets, the cursor jumps to the beginning or end of the file. I do not consider this useful, but it is an intuitive extension of the behavior.

  some text
  on multiple| lines

  Alt+Home →

  |some text
  on multiple lines

I intend to use this for working with pieces of content, but I do not see any downside of that it would work the same way with other brackets, and it may be easier to implement it for all types of brackets at once.

Use Case

Typst is structured as pieces of content, and these pieces are delimited from outer code by square brackets. I often meet cases where I edit multiple pieces of content, and moving in them is not practical. Home and End are used to jump to the beginning and end of the line, but limits of content in typst do not correspond to lines in source code. So keyboard commands for jumping to delimiting brackets would improve my workflow significantly.

A realistic example is that I want to replace a content argument of a function like this:

#figure(
  image("glacier.jpg"),
  caption: [A curious figure.],
)

I want to change the caption. I cannot use selection by words using Ctrl+Shift+arrows or double click because I would either omit the period or select also the right bracket. So I have to select it by characters. After I select the text, I can overwrite it with new text.

With my proposal, I could click anywhere in the caption, press Alt+Home, Alt+Shift+End and write the new text.

This is amplified while using functions with multiple content arguments.

[matj1]

I got this idea because, intuitively, I would select the text in caption: [A curious figure.], in the example by words using double-click selection or Ctrl+Shift+arrows, but successive punctuation is considered one word by the text editor, so the .], is selected at once. I like structural editing, so I think that this proposal is the right approach, but a primitive solution would be that square brackets would break consecutive punctuation into separate words.

But CodeMirror (the text editor used in the web app) supports syntacting parsing of the code and movement according to syntax, so I think that this proposal is viable. (CM's documentation of syntax movement) It can be as a starting point to implementing more movement according to syntax.