rainbow-delimiters

> Lighting up the active scopes As you had guessed a little later, there are a few different emacs packages that do this. One of them is "rainbow parentheses" that gives every bracket a different colour (remember that emacs supports lisp, so differentiating between lots of different parentheses is arguably more useful in emacs than any other editor). [0]. Another one is highlight parentheses [1] which highlights all parens that enclose the cursor position, and gives a darker colour to those "further away" from the cursor. [0] https://github.com/Fanael/rainbow-delimiters [1] https://sr.ht/~tsdh/highlight-parentheses.el/

This article is especially interesting to me, as it shows how VS Code still doesn't have the "Emacs nature". Even though I'm a 30-year Emacs user, I do hesitate to recommend it to younger programmers because it's so alien, and VS Code has one of the essential characteristics of Emacs: the extension language and the implementation language are the same. But this article is a great example of how it doesn't — extensions are limited to using an extension API, rather than having full access to the application's internals. Maybe a good thing, if you're a mass-market product worried about malicious extensions. But I'll note that [rainbow-delimiters-mode](https://github.com/Fanael/rainbow-delimiters/) dates back to 2010, and has never noticeably slowed down loading or display of source files, even in languages with lots of delimiters like Lisp.

Often the information that different brackets and braces would represented in other languages becomes the shape of the s-expressions. I find that easier to parse than most[1] languages. With rainbow-delimiters[2] (example[3]), parsing nested parens becomes far easier. [1] Ruby is a rare exception. [2] https://github.com/Fanael/rainbow-delimiters [3] http://i.imgur.com/xS4y6rT.png

> The braces didn't do anything for a human until indentations were added Having explicit delimiters (I don't care if it's {}, begin...end, or whatever) provide several benefits that I have often used. 1. (by far the most important) They trivialize the recovery of indentation that has been trashed by a bad/misconfigured/unfamiliar editor or coworker who inserted "\t" characters into the file. Just run indent-region or send the file through indent(1). 2. Moving code is easier. Just kill/yank it to where you want it and let indent-region or whatever re-indent as needed. Without delimiters I have to either re-indent manually or use an editor with a feature that changes a region's indent level. Even with such a feature, I still have to tell the editor "move this two levels deeper". With delimiters, I can leave that work to the editor. 3. The