hydra VS smartparens

You can also use Hydra for Emacs.[1] Once I discovered how to configure Hydra, I made it a habit to make one for every new major mode I need to use.

[1] https://github.com/abo-abo/hydra

Have you considered a hydra?

An Emacs specific example: I'm working on a few go projects at the moment and go requires recompilation after changes. Step one was finding auto-recompilers for my projects (I'm using both air and reflex in various projects). Step two was realizing that I spent a lot of time switching to the buffer where the output is printed, so I wrote a little hydra menu to make that easier. Then I found myself having to restart those processes each time I restarted Emacs, so I went digging and found detached to manage the processes. Then I got tired of having to hunt for where the detached output was displayed in my frame so dug into sidebars to manage the windows more effectively.

I think the goal of the hydra package is to provide such functionality.

I would I also encourage anyone who does not want to use modal editing to look into repeat-mode, hydras, and key-chord.

The C-c prefix is designed for you, the user, to use for your nefarious deeds. Some things that may help with both binding and knowing what key does what would be a menu such as hydras or transient menus (which apparently are part of Emacs now so that's new).

For the very same reason, I started to use hydras: https://github.com/abo-abo/hydra - see my config at https://github.com/novoid/dot-emacs/blob/master/config.org

Hydra lets you define mini-modes with limited scope.

general.el also works well with hydra.el. Here's my hydra for window operations - it activates when I press ,w:

Check out smartparens which supports several non-lisp languages including c and js. Learn more here: https://github.com/Fuco1/smartparens

For working with delimiters, you might want to check out Smartparens or Puni. There are many other packages like these, but those are the two I know about.

I think the following packages would fit your wishlist, as it is very similar to mine. As mentioned in the replies, there is (https://github.com/magnars/expand-region.el) and (https://github.com/mickeynp/combobulate). I regularly use (https://github.com/Fuco1/smartparens).

This particular issue has been reported there: https://github.com/Fuco1/smartparens/issues/1017

smart-parens bracket/parens matching is nice

Emacs seems to attract quite a lot of people who want structural code editing. We now have * paredit * smartparens * evil-cleverparens * lispy * symex * combobulate (more?)

Smartparens is trying to bring the paradigm of lispy/paredit to other languages, though the reality is that the non-structured syntax of other languages do not offer the best experience.

If you want to do automatic pairing of Org's markup delimters (which depend on context), I suggest instead trying Smartparens (https://github.com/Fuco1/smartparens), which already supports such pairing.

If not, there is also show-smartparens-mode from the Smartparens package, which is buffer-local.