Ask HN: Do you use electric returns, rainbow parenthesis, etc. in your editor?

2 pointschriszhang1 comment

This is a question mainly for Lisp programmers but possible to be related to other languages too. Do you use fancy features like electric returns, rainbow parenthesis while coding? What about paredit? Are these additional helper plugins worth it?

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I use paredit in Emacs, and most Lisp (Clojure) programmers I know use some variant of paredit in either Emacs or IntelliJ; however, I know one programmer who is very productive without paredit, though he does use rainbow parens.

All those parens in Lisps take a little getting used to, but to be honest, I miss them when working in any other language, precisely because of the structural editing paredit allows.

Also, if you're working in Emacs, I recommend trying aggressive-indent mode as well.

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