Highlight matching parenthesis before the cursor

[ArthaTi]

Consider a scenario where I'm closing a number of consecutive parentheses. While typing, it is most handy to have the opening parenthesis highlighted to match the one I have just closed — this way I can easily figure out how many parentheses remain to insert. For example, here, I have just inserted a closing paren that matches the opening paren to call on line 8. I would expect it to be highlighted.

This can be seen in action in other editors, for example, in Vim:

Helix already has a paren-matching feature, but it happens to only highlight parentheses that exactly match the current selection cursor position, and so, is useless in this case. It would be very helpful to include the previous character. Note that Vim uses the previous character only if there is no match on the current position, which I believe is the best behavior.

[jerabaul29]

Agree that would be nice. Not sure if there are synergies with #2857 .

[TheZoq2]

I requested a similar feature a while back #8547

[the-mikedavis]

Yeah this is a duplicate of #8548

[TheZoq2]

Would it be possible to reconsider this? While I see the point of "semantically this is strange", I don't think it'd cause confusion and now that I'm back on helix I'm still noticing that I have a harder time closing matching braces correctly.

As @jba suggested in #8548 it could even be a config flag for those of us who really like this behaviour

[jba]

@TheZoq2 I have a commit that does this. I've been running off of my local build for months. I could share it with you if this doesn't go forward.