1

Use the [typographically-correct](http://practicaltypography.com/straight-and-curly-quotes.html) quotation characters — **‘ ’ “ ”** — inside strings rather than the easy-to-type straight quotes. Not only will it look better, it wont require escaping or remembering to alternate when nesting.

3

OS X has default key bindings for these characters, but [they don’t make sense](http://www.danandcheryl.com/2010/08/how-to-type-curly-quotes-in-mac-os-x). Save the following snippet as `~/Library/KeyBindings/DefaultKeyBinding.dict` to create custom **⌥** key bindings on the **[ ] { }** keys for these characters.