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Maybe the last sentence needs a bit expanding, I think most readers already use a powerful text editor and don't see how standard features would help with lisp. The thing is, you don't really edit Lisp as text. Two commonly used extensions (for emacs, vim, vscode, sublime...) are paredit and rainbow. Those extensions kick in when lisp code is detected.

It then feels more like tree manipulation than like writing code. Braces are always matched, you literally cannot delete the closing brace using normal text editing. Each tree depth as its own brace color so it's easy to distinguish between them.

Restructuring tree to join two blocks of code or to extract block to higher level is exposed as command mapped to keyboard shortcut. It's not semantic editing in sense that extension is aware what is function and what is data, you can still make nonsense code. Still, reading and manipulating code is quite effortless.



> Two commonly used extensions (for emacs, vim, vscode, sublime...) are paredit and rainbow.

In Emacs, you may find Lispy and Prism even better.




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