HackerReposA FIELD GUIDE TO OPEN SOURCE
ProSponsor the shelf♧ 0
← Back to top all-time
Fuco1
smartparens
Emacs Lisp2013–2022
Fuco1 / smartparens

smartparens

Minor mode for Emacs that deals with parens pairs and tries to be smart about it.

Developer ToolsLanguages & Compilers
Explore on GitHubRead Hacker News discussions
10Distinct people
12Mentions
1Explicit recommenders
1.9KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Minor mode for Emacs that deals with parens pairs and tries to be smart about it.

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

(> smartparens paredit) https://github.com/Fuco1/smartparens I love the animated tutorial, though. Something along those lines would be a great way to augment smartparens' docs.

michaelsbradley used a recommendation phrase. One indexed comment matches. This is a phrase match, not a verdict.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year12 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2013-11-18 23:49:24 UTC to 2022-11-26 21:59:41 UTC.

0123452013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments20132014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 5 mentions; 0 submissions, 5 comments2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments20172018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2022

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20132013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20142014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20152015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC505
20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101

What Hacker News says

12 sources
globuous·Apr 27, 2018
Slightly unrelated, but to those who have never tried Lisp because of the parenthesis (like me until recently), here's my take: I've recently started hacking with Elisp, and I really like it. Parenthesis are obviously pretty awkward at first. But now I wouldn't leave them for anything else. As it turns out, the brackets make it easy for your editor to understand the semantics of your code, to a whole new level. So your editor is now actively helping you navigate and edit your code. You go from expressions to expressions, add one after an other, transpose them and their parameters, absorb other expressions, insert them etc. It's true magic. I thinks that's why some don't like the fact that CL-loop is not "lispy" enough: you lose your editor's help inside a CL loop. So the parents are actually really cool: you can basically tell your editor
Read the rest
to move code around and insert / delete it instead of doing it yourself. With these tools (smart parents and paredit on emacs), your parenthesis are always matched ! And because it's lisp, you're actually forced to use these tools because it's a nightmare otherwise (which makes it kinda hard to learn at first), so you actually do learn them. I haven't used smartparents with other languages, but I hear it works pretty well. Finally, it seems that lisp dialects compile to almost anything. Which means that you can use a lisp editor and get all its benefits even when working in clojure on the JVM or clojurescript on the browser etc. And once you're good at lisp, you can pretty much make Emacs do anything. Conclusion: Lisp Is Pretty, give it a try when you get a chance ;) [0] https://github.com/Fuco1/smartparens EDIT: fixed some sentences so they make sense...
In Lisp in Small Pieces of Clojure, part 3
tuhdo·Apr 17, 2015
Great that you are a Spacemacs user now and glad that you like my tutorials. So, could you be more specific about how vim-sexp works? If you want to visual select sexp from symbol and expanding outward, uses expand-region: https://github.com/magnars/expand-region.el. Same for string. Then you can use smartparens: https://github.com/Fuco1/smartparens to wrap around by simply pressing "(". It is all in Spacemacs now, and you can explore further with evil-lisp-state commands, bound to ", k".
In Spacemacs – Emacs advanced kit focused on Evil

MAKE YOURSELF AT HOME

A few shortcuts

/
Search the collection
?
Open this guide
Esc
Close dialogs and navigation

Your saved repositories and interests stay in this browser.