HopOut

Move outside the nearest enclosing quote, bracket or paren. VS Code has cursorRight and jumpToBracket, but no command that means "get me out of this pair". HopOut adds that command, and puts it on Tab in the one situation where Tab has nothing better to do.

print("hello|")      Tab  ->   print("hello"|)      Tab  ->   print("hello")|
{ a: [1, 2|] }       Tab  ->   { a: [1, 2]| }       Tab  ->   { a: [1, 2] }|
say("hel|lo")     Ctrl+'  ->   say("hello"|)                (from anywhere inside)

| is the cursor.

Keys and commands

All of them work with multiple cursors. With Tab, either every cursor hops or none does.

How Tab stays out of the way

Tab already has many jobs in VS Code. HopOut only takes it when VS Code would otherwise have inserted indentation:

• The keybinding is gated on a context key, hopOut.canHop, that is true only while a hop is possible at the cursor. Everywhere else the key press never reaches the extension, so indenting, Emmet, snippets and other extensions behave exactly as if HopOut were not installed, with no added latency.
• It yields to the suggestion list, snippet placeholders, editor.tabCompletion, inline suggestions and Next Edit Suggestions (Copilot), Cursor Tab, a selection (which Tab indents), and Vim/Neovim normal mode.
• It never hops into a pair: in foo(|"bar") the quote ahead is an opening quote, so Tab indents.
• In the indentation at the start of a line Tab always indents.

Settings

To insert a real tab where HopOut would hop, bind the built-in tab command to a key of your choice, or run HopOut: Toggle Tab Hopping.

Why another tab-out extension

HopOut was written after reading the source and issue trackers of the existing ones. Each row is a reported problem and what HopOut does about it.

What it does not do

HopOut uses a fast structural scan, not a full parser for each language, so:

• Syntax it cannot see, such as regular expression literals containing quotes, heredocs, or a string nested in the interpolation of a string with the same quote, can make it miss a pair. A missed pair means Tab indents; a closing bracket directly ahead is always hopped over regardless.
• The context key that routes Tab follows the cursor a few milliseconds behind. A macro that types a bracket and presses Tab in the same instant, or an extension host that is busy at that moment, gets a normal indent instead of a hop. That is the price of never delaying an ordinary Tab.
• With emmet.triggerExpansionOnTab, an abbreviation sitting directly in front of a closing delimiter is hopped past instead of expanded. Accepting it from the suggestion list works.
• When another extension binds Tab in the same context (Markdown All in One in lists, for example), VS Code decides which one wins. Disable HopOut for that language if it gets in the way.
• AI tools that take Tab through their own context keys, other than Copilot and Cursor, are unknown to the keybinding. Add their key to the when clause of hopOut.tab in Keyboard Shortcuts.

Coming from TabOut

Uninstall or disable TabOut, TabOutX or Leaper so two extensions do not compete for Tab. tabout.charactersToTabOutFrom entries like { "open": "[", "close": "]" } become "[ ]" in hopOut.pairs; single characters such as ; or , go in hopOut.tab.alsoHopOver.

Development

npm install
npm test                  # unit tests for the scanning engine
npm run test:integration  # runs inside an installed VS Code with a throwaway profile, pressing real keys
npm run package           # builds the .vsix

src/engine.ts is the scanner and has no VS Code dependency. src/languages.ts holds the per-language comment syntax and pair adjustments. src/extension.ts keeps the context keys in sync and implements the commands.

License

MIT