emacs-noob VS paren-face

Emacs works reasonably fine. Here's a branch that intends to provide the more familiar key bindings.

PS: I do have an emacs-noob/slime-company that might come handy. This shouldn't depend on anything specific to the OS. (Check the different branches to see which suits the OP/reader's needs!)

(Shameless plug) I'm maintaining a (still quite experimental because I don't personally use it) emacs-noob for people new to emacs but not wanting any long term relation with emacs, or want to focus on learning common lisp first and emacs second. You might find slime-company or slime-company-modern branches useful if this fits your use case.

I attempted emacs-noob/emacs-modern for some of my teammates for developing with common-lisp. It's still very much a new and untested thing though.

But if emacs becomes too-difficult-too-soon in most part due to key-bindings (definitely worth learning for life!), I recently had a try at digikar99/emacs-noob/slime-company-modern for some of my friends, which packs "familiar" key-bindings, but does require a separate installation of a compiler.

I suspect I'm not going to find enough time to maintain a full-fledged VSCode key-bound. I've put up something primitive at digikar99/slime-company-modern and digikar99/emacs-modern.

Alternative using Emacs: https://github.com/tarsius/paren-face

In the spirit of u/tarsius_'s paren-face, I just pushed a new feature to prism.el: parens can be colorized distinctly from other text, so they can be, e.g. faded out into the background (or made to stand out more, if you like).

There is paren-face-mode that can dim the parentheses, especially useful until your mind gets used to lisps.

In a similar idea, you can also make them less visible, so indentation strikes more: https://github.com/tarsius/paren-face/

I like paren-face mode more. Reduce the contrast on the parens a bit so they're still visible but less prominent and it makes it easier to focus on the indentation, which is usually a better at-a-glance indicator of scope and intent. I ended up liking this setup so much that I eventually set it to dim [] {} and (), and to do it for all languages, not just lisps.

If you are using emacs, you might find paren-face-mode useful