paren-face VS prism.el

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

Heh, seriously, though, it's not necessary to use a rainbow of colors. You can use any number of colors and rotate through them. For example, this uses just 3 colors, gradually desaturating them as the depth increases. Since each color is easily distinguished from the other 2, it makes code very readable: https://github.com/alphapapa/prism.el/raw/master/images/parens-0.5.png

If you can use tree-sitter, that's obviously a good choice. Alternatively, you can see how I implemented https://github.com/alphapapa/prism.el, which isn't regexp-based, using Emacs's built-in syntax parsing instead.

I did some experimenting with supporting XML directly in https://github.com/alphapapa/prism.el/issues/16. It seems that it's not easily done with existing Emacs SGML-related functions, but I'm guessing that tree-sitter will help a lot in Emacs 29.

It's not exactly what you asked for, but you may also find this useful: https://github.com/alphapapa/prism.el It can highlight parens distinctly too.

As examples, I can recommend code in https://github.com/alphapapa/highlight-function-calls (simple) and https://github.com/alphapapa/prism.el (more complex).

There is also the package prism.el.

The best advice I can offer is to carefully and repeatedly study the Elisp manual section on font-lock, and to model on the source code of a similar project. The most I've done with it is in https://github.com/alphapapa/prism.el

There is one for emacs. Could be good inspo if someone wanted to make a VSCode version.

https://github.com/alphapapa/prism.el

You might be interested in https://github.com/alphapapa/prism.el