bratex

Emacs package for manipulation of brackets in LaTeX mode

If you dislike the \left and \right macros in LaTeX, you are not alone! Quoting from the manual of the amsmath package (see section 4.14.1):

The automatic delimiter sizing done by \left and \right has two limitations: First, it is applied mechanically to produce delimiters large enough to encompass the largest contained item, and second, the range of sizes is not even approximately continuous but has fairly large quantum jumps.

You might prefer manual sizing through the size modifiers: \big, \Big, \bigg and \Bigg, or even better (this requires amsmath): \bigl...\bigr, \Bigl...\Bigr, \biggl...\biggr and \Biggl...\Biggr. But then, resizing becomes painful: you need to move to the opening delimiter, change its size modifier, then move to the closing delimiter, and do the same.

Introducing bratex, that defines functions to automatically cycle through size delimiters.

Getting started

A picture is worth a thousand words… So the four major functions defined in the bratex package are illustrated below.

Cycling through the delimiter sizes

bratex-cycle-size (S-up)	bratex-cycle-size-reverse (S-down)

Cycling through the delimiter types

bratex-cycle-bracket (S-right)	bratex-cycle-bracket-reverse (S-left)

Installation

For the time being, package-install is not enabled (contributions welcome!).

Checkout the current repository, and place the file bratex.el somewhere in your load-path.

Configuration with the default latex-mode

Add the following lines to your init.el file

(require 'bratex)
(add-hook 'latex-mode-hook #'bratex-config)

Configuration with AUCTeX

Add the following lines to your init.el file

(require 'bratex)
(add-hook 'LaTeX-mode-hook #'bratex-config)