symex.el VS things.el

Compare symex.el vs things.el and see what are their differences.

symex.el

An intuitive way to edit Lisp symbolic expressions ("symexes") structurally in Emacs (by drym-org)

things.el

Extensions to thingatpt.el (by noctuid)
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symex.el things.el
18 4
252 50
1.6% -
6.2 2.6
6 months ago 4 months ago
Emacs Lisp Emacs Lisp
GNU General Public License v3.0 or later -
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

symex.el

Posts with mentions or reviews of symex.el. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-02-04.
  • Sapling: A highly experimental vi-inspired editor where you edit code, not text
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 4 Feb 2024
    I also recommend symex[1]. Although it is more “locked-in” to s-expressions than other solutions (which takes some getting used to at first), I find that for me this is exactly what makes movement feel much more intuitive and editing much more precise.

    The one thing I don’t like is that symex depends on so many other plugins (especially Evil, which I am trying to swap out with the more lightweight meow), but this will apparently change soon. They are also working towards support for non-Lisp languages via tree-sitter, but I don’t know how well it works.

    [1]: https://github.com/drym-org/symex.el

  • Tree-sitter starter guide
    7 projects | /r/emacs | 17 Jan 2023
    This is a really useful synopsis. symex has recently had TS support merged in, and apparently includes navigation and structural editing similar to its lisp-like language capabilities. I think it's still early going and I haven't tested, but may be worth a look.
  • Learn Lisp the Hard Way
    5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 10 Jan 2023
  • What modal sexp editing mode should I switch to?
    6 projects | /r/emacs | 10 Jan 2023
    Has anyone used symex.el without evil? I just learned it can be use with vanilla emacs (despite the 2nd word in its tagline). I also learned they have a tree-sitter branch which will expand its powers to many languages.
    6 projects | /r/emacs | 10 Jan 2023
    you might want to take a look at symex. it uses lispy under the hood (along with other structural editing packages), so its still going to pull a lot of undesired dependencies, but it might some some of the issues you have, albeit with a slightly different notion of modal i.e. modal as in vim's modes. i haven't jumped the shark yet cause it has an issue with evil's visual state, which is key for my workflow either, so i'm using lispy for now. though i must say i haven't encountered many of the issues you talk about, such as things breaking outside lisp modes and etc.
  • Advice on config hacking / yak shaving / bikeshedding
    7 projects | /r/emacs | 23 Dec 2022
    I started out using evil, but now I mostly use Symex. (Structural editing. non-lisps support wip for those sad moments you can't use lisp). For now depends on evil, but could be separated.
  • You are invited to the First Congress for Attribution-Based Economics!
    2 projects | /r/emacs | 21 Dec 2022
    The purpose of this congress is to engage in the process of Dialectical Inheritance Attribution, which is a collective process by which we apply agreed-upon standards to the task of appraising and attributing the value of work done in the world. At this initial congress, there are two open source projects on the agenda to be appraised: Symex.el which is an Emacs extension, and Qi, which is a functional DSL on the Racket platform.
  • paredit based on treesitter
    3 projects | /r/emacs | 30 Nov 2022
    symex has a branch that’s been working on integrating with tree-sitter.
  • Paredit 25 Released
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 26 Nov 2022
    If you want to go nuts with structural editing you may also want to check out symex mode: https://github.com/drym-org/symex.el

    It uses paredit (among others) for its low level functionality, but the vim-style modal interface allows you to manipulate the tree structure with single keystrokes in a precise and very expressive way. Keep in mind that you have to actively learn how to use it and it will feel awkward at first (similar to how vim feels for beginners), but I find the editing experience very pleasent and smooth after I got used to it.

    Another thing I really like about it is that you can still switch to normal mode and it doesn’t get in your way like other plugins where I had to change my keybindings all the time because the amount of convenient shortcuts is still quite limited in the end. This modal switching to different editing contexts (or languages?) is something I feel should be explored much further.

  • What are your favorite packages for improving vanilla emacs text editing?
    3 projects | /r/emacs | 28 Oct 2022

things.el

Posts with mentions or reviews of things.el. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2021-12-13.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing symex.el and things.el you can also consider the following projects:

lispy - Short and sweet LISP editing

elisp-tree-sitter - Emacs Lisp bindings for tree-sitter

smartparens - Minor mode for Emacs that deals with parens pairs and tries to be smart about it.

evil-textobj-tree-sitter - Tree-sitter powered textobjects for evil mode in Emacs

gopcaml-mode

emacs - Mirror of GNU Emacs

typescript.el - TypeScript-support for Emacs

xah-fly-keys - the most efficient keybinding for emacs

puni - Structured editing (soft deletion, expression navigating & manipulating) that supports many major modes out of the box.

link-hint.el - Pentadactyl-like Link Hinting in Emacs with Avy