Happy Birthday Smartparens!

Fuco1 writes that today smartparens is 5 years old. To celebrate, Fuco1 has released Version 1.11.0. Over the last 5 years, smartparens has become a ubiquitous and very popular package.

In the unlikely event that some Irreal reader is not familiar with smartparens, it’s a replacement for paredit that is useful outside of the Lisp world. Take a look at the README for the details. The TL;DR is that it provides paredit-like functionality for other languages.

Paredit’s central idea is that it forces you to maintain a syntactically correct Lisp program by enforcing matching parentheses and quotes. Smartparens can do that too but you can also choose to run it in non-strict mode that makes dealing with other languages (and plain text) easier.

If you haven’t tried it out, you really should. It brings the benefits of paredit to all of your buffers. If you aren’t already a paredit or smartparens user, you need to fix that. Paredit, especially, can be hard to get used to but the benefits are worth the effort. In Lisp, especially, it serves as an on-the-fly error checker.

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