Don't you think this would be a nice feature? (Place holder)

[Weiwei]

Hi guys,

I'm a Emacs newbie, just jumped into it from Vim. I'm using AUCTeX to
write LaTeX files. In Vim, it has a very nice feature -- placeholder.
For example, you have the following skeleton in inserting figures:

\begin{figure}[H]
  \centering
  \subfigure[]{\includegraphics[width=3.1in]{}}
  \subfigure[]{\includegraphics[width=3.1in]{}}
  \caption{}
  \label{fig:}
\end{figure}

Now your cursor is in the third line between the first square brackets
[], after you type something, you want to jump to the brackets at the
end of the same line {}, and so forth. Vim LaTeX suite has this
function with a single key-stroke. In AUCTeX, I didn't find such one,
or maybe I missed it. Could anybody kindly point it to me if it
exists?

Now lets look at this feature a little bit further. Can we have (Or do
we already have) a universal place-holder in Emacs? For example, we
have a block of text/program as this:

foofoofoo<>foofoofoofoofoofoofoofoofoofoofoofoo
foo<>foofoofoofoofoofoofoo<>foofoofoofoofoofoo
foofoofoofoofoo<>foofoofoofoofoofoofoofoofoofoo

The <> indicates a place-holder in which you want to jump quickly. The
function I proposed is to find next <>, and then delete the left "<"
and right ">", and leave cursor there.

I'm not sure if any similar functions are already there. I think it
should be easy with regular expressions. Simply I'm not a regexp guy.
What do you guys think? And anybody want to have a try? Thanks!


Weiwei