How to manipulate surrounding symbols?

[jdnavarro]

Coming from Helix , I'm missing something like its surround functionality.

For surround symbols which are the same, like ", I thought of using beacon mode, but how do you insert fake cursors at the beginning and end of a region?

[DogLooksGood]

No, there's not. But Emacs has a lot packages for manipulating parentheses, like smartparens or paredit.

For vanilla Emacs, there's a command called insert-pair.

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