I've never gotten used to eXide's auto-pair function. This is where you type a single " and get two - "" - with your cursor placed between them. The same behavior affects ', (, and {. Often, when I am trying to insert a single instance of these characters, the editor inserts two. Then I delete one, but the editor deletes both. This can be maddening and leads to many extraneous key presses. I imagine some developers are used to this behavior from other code editors, but for me - and I'd bet - many new users, typing one thing and having something else happen is disconcerting and leads to wasted keypresses.

Would it be possible to add a preference disabling this?

Caveat: I would hope that this preference wouldn't disable the autocompletion of elements, e.g., <x>as soon as I type </immediately becomes <x>as soon as I type </x>. This generally works well - not perfect, but on balance is a time saver. Also valuable is the snippet behavior, where I can type a code like html, tap control-space, and html is replaced by some XQuery code.