Last updated on December 10, 2016

In GNU Emacs, electric-pair-mode is a minor mode for auto closing pairs of (curly) braces/brackets/quotes, which was first introduced in Emacs 24. However, up till now, it still has not provided an easy option to disable a certain pair—we need to make use of electric-pair-inhibit-predicate. To disable a certain pair, such as double quotes, we can add the following to ~/.emacs or ~/.emacs.d/init.el:

(setq electric-pair-inhibit-predicate
      `(lambda (c)
         (if (char-equal c ?\") t (,electric-pair-inhibit-predicate c))))

To disable a certain pair for a specific mode, for example to disable the pairing of {} in web-mode (to allow web-mode to better handle the auto pairing of the template tags {% %}), we can add the following to ~/.emacs or ~/.emacs.d/init.el:

;; disable {} auto pairing in electric-pair-mode for web-mode
(add-hook
 'web-mode-hook
 (lambda ()
   (setq-local electric-pair-inhibit-predicate
               `(lambda (c)
                  (if (char-equal c ?{) t (,electric-pair-inhibit-predicate c))))))

For more information, please move onto the documentation of the variable electric-pair-inhibit-predicate.