How difficult would it be to implement something like this: double space to escape enclosing asterisk

I'm using markdown-mode and have the following custom keybinds: * C-b puts ```**|**``` (```|``` is the cursor), so that the text is bold * C-i puts ```*|*``` so that the text is italic The problem is that I often get in this kind of situation: ( ``|`` represents the cursor) >Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, \*\*consectetur adipiscing |\*\* elit, sed do eiusmod When I type something between the asterisks I always leave an appending whitespace inside, before getting out of the enclosing asterisks. One solution could be to interpret a double space as "get out of the enclosing asterisks". This way, if I type another space in the example above, this would be the result: >Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, \*\*consectetur adipiscing\*\*| elit, sed do eiusmod I'd like this to be possible even for backticks. However, it doesn't seem like an easy task (I'm not a elisp expert, but i could make it through its particular syntax). Is there some hint or already built tool out there that could help me? Thank you in advance

Quick and dirty would be simple: bind something like this to SPC: ​ (defun out-of-asteriks-or-space () (interactive) (if (and (looking-at " \\*\\*") (looking-back " ")) (forward-char 3) (insert " "))) ​ But this doesn't check if the cursor is in between paired asterisks. So to refine might be more work, but should not be too complicated. The first thing I would check is, if markdown-mode already provides such a check.

Words between asterisks have specific faces: `markdown-bold-face` and `markdown-italic-face`. I could maybe use those to know if i'm between asterisks? However, as long as i put even 1 trailing space after the last word, the face disappears. I was thinking instead of something like this (in pseudocode) bind SPACE to lambda: insert space if current-face is markdown-bold-face AND the cursor is past the last non-blank character then def next_key = read next key (and execute it) if next key is SPACE then delete all trailing spaces get past the closing delimiters

Well, that sounds like a good option to start with. But from here I can not help you. (I do not use markdown-mode and am not interested in getting into it's details) In my experience these little things are easy to fix in a way that is sufficient for your own use-case but hard to get right in a more general sense. But I think the learning-experience is worth it.

It's not a very good idea to have an Emacs command read the next key and execute it: let the command loop handle that! How about just modifying u/Gallipo's function to delete the spaces and move forward when the last key you pressed was also space? (I also modified it to work with other markup characters.) (defun out-of-markup-or-space () (interactive) (if (and (looking-at "[*_`]") (eq last-command 'out-of-markup-or-space)) (progn (delete-horizontal-space) (skip-chars-forward "*_`")) (insert " ")))

TIL about `last-command`. Thank you both for your help, your code definitely did the trick.

Nice!

What makes sense to me is to use context: if you have a selection, it gets wrapped appropriately and the point is moved out, if not selection the point stays put.