by harperlee on 1/20/25, 8:21 AM with 32 comments
by simongray on 1/20/25, 12:12 PM
When you start out with Clojure/Lisp and you aren't totally used to parenthesis you can just use Parinfer to get editor behaviour similar to developing Python. It removes a major pain point of migrating to a Lisp. It used to be the case that you were forced to learn Paredit pretty much from the start.
by lemming on 1/20/25, 9:08 PM
It's still a bit quirky, but I use it every day and I love it. Even though I'm proficient enough with paredit, parinfer is just so much easier to use. Several users have commented to me that the parinfer integration is the main thing stopping them switching away to a different editor - it really makes that much difference.
by fnordsensei on 1/20/25, 6:56 PM
I remember people, including Rich Hickey, scoffing at it when it came out, which seemed like kind of a snobbish reaction to something that lowers the barriers of entry.
by phforms on 1/20/25, 6:25 PM
My favourite structural editing tool for about a year now is symex[1], which is an Emacs package (and unfortunately not that well known compared to paredit, lispy, etc.). It takes some getting used to at first but after a while you only move around and think in terms of s-expressions, you don’t even see parentheses anymore. It really feels like you are a squirrel climbing trees (hence the image on the repo, I guess). I just hope the dev(s) will be able to get rid of the heavy dependencies on other packages soon.
by Folcon on 1/20/25, 1:27 PM
It has gaps around pasting content and how to handle that elegantly as well as comment behaviour, if those two things could be reconciled, it would be even more useful :)...
by mkreis on 1/20/25, 12:00 PM
At first I thought this is something new, because it's cool and I haven't heard of it, even though I'm coding in Clojure for about 3 years now. But this project is already 10 years old and hasn't received much attention for the last few years, which is a pity. I wish it was coming with Calva, my favorite Clojure tooling in VS Code.
by knubie on 1/20/25, 5:56 PM
by jordanrobinson on 1/20/25, 12:59 PM
by gpanders on 1/21/25, 10:18 PM
Neither my plugin nor Chris' script have been updated in 2+ years. That's because it just keeps working. I owe a lot to Shaun and Chris for their work (my plugin is just a little glue code for interacting with the editor, they did all of the hard work).
by kazinator on 1/21/25, 1:33 AM
There are some issues, but it's usable.
I hacked in a hotkey to toggle it on and off (Ctrl-Underline).
The parinfer code from Vim does not work in the parens->indent direction, only indent->parens. I tried to get it working, but it didn't for me.
It doesn't properly understand the #; syntax for commenting out an object. It's possible for it to get into an endless loop when an undo operation restores invalid syntax; there is a kind of fight between undo and parinfer that has to be interrupted by Ctrl-C.
Otherwise it's mostly fine.
by j13n on 1/21/25, 8:46 AM
I've since settled on Lispy and Lispyville in Emacs, and have run into very few issues over the past few years.
There's something about Lispy’s style of editing that appeals to me — the use of hugging parentheses to enable its bindings, combined with Lispyville making all of my Vim bindings safe, makes me very happy.
by zelcon on 1/20/25, 11:18 PM
by ralphc on 1/22/25, 12:12 AM