rainbow-delimiters VS rainbow-identifiers

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.

> Giving the same hue to names that look like each other.

Emacs' 'Rainbow Identifiers' does that. I like it.

    https://github.com/Fanael/rainbow-identifiers

I am currently using rainbow identifiers, but I am wondering if there is another package that is better.

For something fancy, there's also rainbow-blocks and rainbow-identifiers