Question about the design intent of <C-g>s in insert mode

[bbnolauv]

This might be a somewhat stupid question, and I mean no disrespect.

While reading the nvim-surround manual, I noticed the <C-g>s mapping available in insert mode, which adds a delimiter pair around the cursor position (for example:

local str = *    -> <C-g>s" -> local str = "*"

I’m a bit confused about the intended use case for this design.

Functionally, <C-g>s in insert mode feels similar to what many autopairs-style plugins already provide. Compared to those, the interaction seems slightly more involved, which leads me to wonder:

• What is the primary design goal of providing <C-g>s in insert mode?
• Is it expected that users frequently rely on nvim-surround for pairing even while inserting text, rather than delegating this to autopairs plugins?
• Or is this mainly meant to preserve conceptual and behavioral consistency of “surround” operations across normal, visual, and insert modes?

I’d appreciate some insight into the reasoning behind this feature. Thanks for maintaining such a great plugin!

[kylechui]

Good question! It's to attain feature parity with vim-surround. I personally don't use it, and I can't imagine a large portion of my users use it (for the reasons you cite), but there have been bug reports in the past about it. If I were designing this plugin from scratch, I likely would have omitted it.