Improve apostrophe usage

[bszonye]

’Tis difficult to type a leading apostrophe with the smart quotes turned on. The plugin works well for internal apostrophes, but it interferes with leading apostrophes in abbreviations like ’tis and ’20s.

U+2019 RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK is the appropriate glyph for a typographic apostrophe. The default configuration uses it as the closing quote for smart quotes. Unfortunately, it's difficult to type with the smart quotes turned on. If you try to type '20s then you get ‘20s’ with the left single quote in front and the right single quote after. If you type ' and then hit backspace to remove the unneeded left quote, you get a pair of straight quotes instead.

In order to type ’20s with the correct quote in the right place, I need to use something like this sequence:

' left del right 20s

which is especially awkward in vim mode.

Also, if you reconfigure your single quotation marks, then there's no way to get a smart apostrophe at all. For example, if you change the single quotation marks to brackets, then isn’t becomes isn)t.

I'm not sure of the best way to improve the interface for apostrophes, but I have a suggestion. First, give apostrophes their own configuration instead of using the right single quote configuration. Use that for internal quotation marks. Second, provide a key sequence that produces a single apostrophe instead of a pair of smart quotes. Perhaps pressing apostrophe twice in a row might override, in a similar way to using apostrophe+backspace now? That way, you could simply type ''20s to get ’20s.