emacs-light VS smartparens

If you don’t feel like going through this tutorial step by step and just want the code, you can find it at my emacs-light repo. Follow the README there to get started.

Short answer, if the only concern coming from (neo)vim are the keybindings then you can install the vim emulation package "evil" https://github.com/emacs-evil/evil and get started. The config that I build in this tutorial is also here https://github.com/shaneikennedy/emacs-light which has evil installed by default.

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.