One thing you can do is use "shift space" instead of space - this will result in a space character being entered with no special expansions. You probably don't want to do that all the time but it's handy to know.
You can also define your own alias expansions - see Tools -> options -> aliases. For "C", select the c.als item. See the help item "extension specific aliases" for how to create an alias (click new, enter the alias name, enter the alias expansion in the right hand edit window). e.g. if you create an alias with the name of "if" and expansion text as below
if (%\c )
{
}
then typing "if" followed by a space will produce text that has 3 space characters between the parentheses, with the cursor immediately following the left parentheses. If you don't want any extra characters, just enter expansion text of "if ".
For dynamic surround, if you wanted to keep dynamic surround enabled but with cursor-down doing its normal thing instead of expanding the blue box, you could comment the lines below in surround.e - you'll find these at approx line 1993 in surround.e. After changing the code, you need to load the modified file - use module load on the macro menu to compile the surround.e file. "cursor-down" is the name of the command that the "down" key is bound to (rather than the name of the key itself), so whatever key you have cursor-down bound to will have the special processing in the do_surround_mode_keys function. Therefore, instead of commenting the code below, you could change the name "cursor-down" to "my-surround-cursor-down", then write your own my-surround-cursor-down macro and bind a key to it (e.g. alt shift down) - then you can use alt-shift-down to still get the "box expansion" in dynamic surround.
Similar to shift-space, there's also shift-enter which is the same as pressing enter but all the special processing (such as comment wrapping) is inhibited.
Once you get used to syntax expansions though, you won't want to be without them.
Graeme
// code from surround.e line 1993
case 'cursor-up':
if (first_time && gSurroundMarkerNumStartLines==0) break event_loop;
num_lines = get_num_surround_lines(-1);
unsurround_lines(start_line, end_line, num_lines, p);
continue;
case 'cursor-down':
maybe_delete_blank_line(first_time, start_line, end_line);
num_lines = get_num_surround_lines(1);
surround_lines(start_line, end_line, num_lines, p);
continue;
