emacs-noob VS rainbow-delimiters

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.

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.