symex.el

I’ve been considering Parinfer, but my issue was that it is a bit unpredictable where parens end up and I have to be careful to not mess up my code structure. Maybe I should give it another try for a longer time period. My favourite structural editing tool for about a year now is symex[1], which is an Emacs package (and unfortunately not that well known compared to paredit, lispy, etc.). It takes some getting used to at first but after a while you only move around and think in terms of s-expressions, you don’t even see parentheses anymore. It really feels like you are a squirrel climbing trees (hence the image on the repo, I guess). I just hope the dev(s) will be able to get rid of the heavy dependencies on other packages soon. [1]: https://github.com/drym-org/symex.el/

I also recommend symex[1]. Although it is more “locked-in” to s-expressions than other solutions (which takes some getting used to at first), I find that for me this is exactly what makes movement feel much more intuitive and editing much more precise. The one thing I don’t like is that symex depends on so many other plugins (especially Evil, which I am trying to swap out with the more lightweight meow), but this will apparently change soon. They are also working towards support for non-Lisp languages via tree-sitter, but I don’t know how well it works. [1]: https://github.com/drym-org/symex.el

I'm also very curious for hear from expert lispers. I've tried to find the sweat spot where lisp would fit better than what I already know: shell for glue and file ops, R for data munging and vis, python to not reinvent things, perl/core-utils for one liners. But before I can find the niche, I get turned off by the amount of ceremony -- or maybe just how different the state and edit/evaluate loop is. I'm holding onto some things that make common lisp look exciting and useful (static typing[0], APL DSL[1], speed [2,3,4]) and really want to get familiar with structural editing [5] [0] https://github.com/phantomics/april [1] https://github.com/coalton-lang/coalton/ [2] https://renato.athaydes.com/posts/revisiting-prechelt-paper-... [3] https://github.com/fukamachi/woo/blob/master/benchmark.md [4] https://tapoueh.org/blog/2014/05/why-is-pgl

If you want to go nuts with structural editing you may also want to check out symex mode: https://github.com/drym-org/symex.el It uses paredit (among others) for its low level functionality, but the vim-style modal interface allows you to manipulate the tree structure with single keystrokes in a precise and very expressive way. Keep in mind that you have to actively learn how to use it and it will feel awkward at first (similar to how vim feels for beginners), but I find the editing experience very pleasent and smooth after I got used to it. Another thing I really like about it is that you can still switch to normal mode and it doesn’t get in your way like other plugins where I had to change my keybindings all the time because the amount of convenient shortcuts is still quite limited in the end. This modal switching to different editing c