aggressive-indent-mode VS rainbow-delimiters

I had a similar problem yesterday and it was because of a recent bug in aggressive-indent-mode https://github.com/Malabarba/aggressive-indent-mode/pull/157

For elisp, I have been using srefactor for a long time, but it has quite a few issues have not been update in 5 years. Most other formatters for elisp/lisp that I have seen has some subtle issues or just does not handle splitting of long lines. People also have suggested just using aggressive-indent-mode and then putting the line breaks manually, but I was hoping to avoid having to decide where/when to split long lines as well.

See also the Aggressive Indent package: https://github.com/Malabarba/aggressive-indent-mode

aggressive-indent-mode

paren-face-mode can be combined with aggressive-indent-mode to help oneself focus on the indentation the way a lisper should

It's not what you are asking for, but I think https://github.com/Malabarba/aggressive-indent-mode can be helpful

I'm a big fan of rainbow-delimiters, available on Melpa.

rainbow-delimiters ( https://github.com/Fanael/rainbow-delimiters/ ) does this for parenthesis/braces etc but is somewhat bound to the syntax tree of whatever major mode is currently in use, it also scans on a per-character basis, where I'd need to scan for regex.

> 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.

Using highlight-parentheses-mode, which is an additional package, helps. There are also show-paren-mode (build in) and rainbow-delimiters (additional package), whose could help there.