/Rant

Oh come off it! I hate this kind of elitist bull crap. Don't like editor putting something into buffer, do you? Do you have set ai in your vimrc? 3 guesses to what that does. How about set et? 'consent' you say? How is explicitly installing a plugin not expression of consent?

And as for your dismissive jibe about 'just imap' - auto-pairs is a bit more nuanced than that. For example it handles pairing quotes as well. Let's see your quick dismissive solution for that which handles closing quotes as well.

Why am I so angry? Well, because there are so many of these 'gurus' who go around being dismissive of other peoples preferences as tho their's is the only one true way. The comment could easily just have been, "I like to be explicit about entering my parentheses and even if I wasn't here's how I'd do it without a plugin ", instead of all that consent nonsense.

/End rant

Btw, I tried to use autopairing yesterday in sublime text 3. What I noticed that it is easy to get used to autopairing on entering lines, but when line is edited again, it often leads to unbalanced parethesis. Happened to me every time unless attention was paid, because it works not a like what your finger-memory expects from new line entering. Do you experience this? Does autopairing.vim solve this issue?

I have ~50 lines in .[g]vimrc for variables only, including ai, et. From the autopairing readme it is clear that it can do sophisticated things that :imap cannot.

Edit: I like to be explicit about entering non-whitespace, but have few imaps for snippets and formatting in per-directory x.vim files, to be clear.

Also auto-pairs.vim doesn't seem to break the dot command, contrary to the mapping they provided.

> without my explicit command

Technically, the "explicit command" requirement is fulfilled because you explicitly installed the plugin.