compat VS smartparens

With the Compat library you can use define-keymap right away in your packages. See also my post about Compat.

Exactly, I think printing a loud warning is a perfectly acceptable solution. The note should ideally tell the user to ensure that dependencies are met. It makes sense to teach users a little better about the limitations of Straight or Elpaca with respect to dependency handling since I've seen many reports across the ecosystem where people didn't properly update dependencies. I usually bump dependencies when I really need new functionality. In particular with our Compat package, versions are meaningful and should be respected.

Compat co-maintainer here. Thank you for writing this post! One minor correction: Compat supports Emacs 24.4 and newer. Please link to the upstream repository at https://github.com/emacs-compat/compat instead of the Straight mirror, since the mirror does not preserve the Git history.

As /u/usaoc said, ensure-list can be used for this purpose - I use it all the time in my packages. I recommend to take advantage of the Compat package from GNU ELPA, such that you can use all new Emacs APIs even in packages targeting older Emacs versions. I am the maintainer of Compat. See also https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/10iep0o/compat_29130/ for more background.

I released version 29.1.3.0 of Compat, the Elisp forwards-compatibility library on GNU ELPA. This library may be interesting for you, if you want to use newer Emacs developments in your packages without breaking backward compatibility with older Emacs versions.

I updated some packages which included updating the dependency compat.el to 28.1.2.0

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.