Auto-closing for Liquid delimiters `{{`, `{%`, `{{-`, `{%-`

[RomainDW]

Description

Typing Liquid delimiters does not auto-close them properly. Currently, typing {{ produces {{} with the cursor between the second { and the }, which is incorrect. The extension should auto-close all Liquid delimiters with their proper closing counterparts and position the cursor conveniently.

Expected behavior

Typed	Result	Cursor position (shown as ▌)
{{	{{ ▌ }}	Centered with spaces
{{-	{{- ▌ -}}	Centered with spaces
{%	{% ▌ %}	Centered with spaces
{%-	{%- ▌ -%}	Centered with spaces

The cursor should be placed in the middle with a space on each side, ready for the user to type the expression or tag name.

Actual behavior

Typing {{ produces {{} — it appears the editor treats { as a bracket that should be auto-closed with }, but it doesn't recognize {{ as a Liquid delimiter pair. The result is a malformed output with the cursor in the wrong position.

Steps to reproduce

1. Open any .liquid file in Zed
2. Type {{
3. Observe the result is {{} instead of {{ ▌ }}
4. Same issue occurs with {%

Additional context

This is a very common quality-of-life feature in other editors with Liquid support (e.g., VS Code with the Shopify Liquid extension). Proper auto-closing of Liquid delimiters significantly improves the development experience, as these are typed hundreds of times per day during theme development.

Suggested implementation

Zed supports bracket pair configuration in language extensions. The following pairs should be configured:

• {{ / }}
• {% / %}
• {{- / -}}
• {%- / -%}

With auto-inserted spaces around the cursor position for each pair.

[jeffreyguenther]

We set bracket pairs in the extension config. Could this config need adjusting?

[RomainDW]

The bracket pairs config already looks correct:

brackets = [
    { start = "{{", end = "}}", close = true, newline = false },
    { start = "{{-", end = "-}}", close = true, newline = false },
    { start = "{%", end = "%}", close = true, newline = false },
    { start = "{%-", end = "-%}", close = true, newline = false },
]

The issue is likely caused by the HTML injection interfering. Since template_content is injected as HTML (in injections.scm), and HTML defines { / } as a single-character bracket pair, typing the first { triggers the HTML auto-close into {}. When the second { is typed, the cursor is already between { and }, producing {{} instead of {{}}.

So the config itself doesn't need adjusting — the multi-character pairs are correctly defined. The problem is that the single-character {/} pair from the injected HTML language fires before the multi-character {{/}} pair from the Liquid config gets a chance to match.

As for the requested auto-spacing ({{ ▌ }}), Zed's bracket pair config doesn't support inserting spaces between delimiters — there's no property for that. This would likely need to be handled via snippets or a Zed core feature request.

Possible fixes for the auto-close conflict:

1. Check if Zed has a way to prioritize bracket pairs from the host language over injected languages
2. Open an issue on zed-industries/zed about multi-character bracket pair priority when language injections are involved

[jeffreyguenther]

I would definitely open up an issue/PR upstream on Zed for this issue. The issue would be present for any double bracket language and I think that would include many template languages. Also, Liquid is an important enough language that making the case for the fix should be straightforward.

[RomainDW]

Opened an upstream issue on Zed: zed-industries/zed#53291

[jeffreyguenther]

Let's see what the Zed team says. Likely you'll have to do the fix too.