Change type of matching parentheses in TeXstudio

Question

I am working in TexStudio (2.9.0). I want to change the type of a pair of matching parenthesis. For example,

\command{something (involving (even)(more)parenthesis)}

should become

\command{something [involving (even)(more)parenthesis]}

Note that the parenthesis after something changed from ( ) to [ ].

Am I overlooking a feature of TeXstudio? Might this be possible with user-defined makros?

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As a remark: Creation of these parentheses is easily possible by selecting the text and pressing the opening parenthesis of the desired type. So a selected text becomes (text) on pressing (. Unfortunately, there is no way to later change this comfortably to [text].

Answer 1

Indeed this is possible with a user macro. the key is the function app.jumpToBracket() which stands behind Idefix -> Prentheses -> Jump to Match. If the cursor is at one bracket, it moves to the other.

After placing the cursor before the first bracket, run

%SCRIPT
cursor.deleteChar()
cursor.insertText('[')
app.jumpToBracket()
cursor.deleteChar()
cursor.insertText(']')

That's the basic principle. You may add additional checks that the cursor is really next to a bracket and/or make it work if the cursor is after the bracket (use cursor.deletePreviousChar() instead).