Paredit made a massive difference when I was writing Lisp. It does take some getting used to, but pretty sure it was a net positive after a week of use.

I actually started enabling it when writing other languages (Python/C++) to see if it could do its magic there.

You probably know that, but there is smartparens mode which does similar magic to non-lisp languages: https://github.com/Fuco1/smartparens

I did not know that!

In recent years, I have been spoiled by doom-emacs (and previously spacemacs). They have made everything work out of the box for me to such an extent that I mostly don't know what's active--I've just learned the right leader combination to get what I need done.

It turns out I've been using smartparens without realizing--just opened a file and checked the active modes to find out.

The keys I've learned are (using evil):

- [Visual mode] S -> surround by a pair

- [Visual mode] d <char> -> delete pair of <char>

- [Visual mode] c <c1> <c2> -> replace pair of <c1> with pair of <c2>

Those along with C-M-k to kill a sexp and % to go to the other end of a pair have been all I need for my work (the vast majority C/C++ and Python).

One thing I keep putting off is figuring out a way to jump to the opening/closing quotes. For those I still have to go medieval if there's any nesting.

I think it is worth it. Mastering it was one of the first times I felt like I had gained a programming power up. It's definitely a little awkward at first but if you keep at it, eventually the switch will flip and you'll wonder how you could've lived without it.

Paredit is so good that even after taking a break from Lisp for years, as soon as I opened up an .el file to do some Emacs customisation, the muscle memory was fully intact and I was able to perform structural edits without even thinking about which keys I pressed. I try not to write too much Lisp these days, because I inevitably become depressed at how clumsy it is to manipulate syntax in the languages I use more commonly.

I would consider myself a fairly unserious paredit user and I still think it's immensely useful. The things I use most of the time are really just barf, slurp and splice yet it makes so much more sense to me now to think of S-expressions structurally rather than just editing text.

Both the advantage and disadvantage of lisp are its lack of structure and paredit forcing you to keep your code intact really prevents a ton of issues just by having it on.

Same. I don’t even have shortcuts for paredit, I just M-X barf-forward- whatever (fuzzy find with selectrum) when I need it.

The only paredit shortcut I know is M-s to remove a set of parens.

That said I also use boon, which has some modal editing in particular a way to skip past an entire set of parens.

To GP: Why not enable it just for sake of keeping your parens balanced. Make sure you have a good way to discover commands like selectrum. And tada. Don’t have to learn it all right away.

Somewhat related - does anyone use meow + paredit? I can’t find a clearly recommended way to combine the two as I can with boon.