[wnesensohn]

Honest advice: The power of paredit lies not in managing the closing parens. I found that the benefits of paredit show only when you use barf/slurp/split/join. Keep the paredit cheat-sheet around (http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/PareditCheatsheet) for quick reference, and if you're anything like me and don't like the emacs-meta-ctrl-style key-combos, customize the keys, I've found the defaults to be quite lacking for vim/evil users.

Using paredit only for parens-matching feels to me like using only hjkl in vim. While you can use vim this way, you won't fully reap the benefits until you start to use the other movement commands.

[aerique]

Could you do a little write-up on your paredit workflow. Like the post you replied to I've found it mostly annoying to use in normal Emacs and nowadays with evil-mode.

[wnesensohn]

I'll be honest with you: I'm maybe not the one to give proper advice on paredit. I'm using C# on my day job, and as such have no use for paredit (I do use ViEmu for VS though, which makes VS bearable) for most of my programming tasks.

Also, I've never done anything in clojure. I expect it to be a similar experience to CL, but the different types of parenthesis might have an effect on using paredit efficiently.

That said, I found that the following mapping really makes a huge difference when working with sexps & evil-mode:

C-l: paredit-forward-slurp-sexp C-k: paredit-backward-barf-sexp C-j: paredit-backward-slurp-sexp C-h: paredit-forward-barf-sexp

Your mileage may vary, of course. I mapped it this way because my fingers dictated it, and it plays well with vim/evil.

As to how to actually use these commands: Try them out on a few sexps, it'll be clear to you pretty soon. Also be sure to check out Emacs Rocks! ep14 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D6h5dFyyUX0), it's well worth the 3:40.

I actually find learning paredit to be very similar to learning vim: You start with almost nothing (maybe hjkl in vim, but even that takes a while to get used to), and slowly add new tricks to your tool belt. Also like with vim, everyone has their own style of using the tools.

Of course, there's a ton of other things in paredit which can improve your efficiency which I haven't added to my muscle-memory yet. It's just that I found barfing/slurping to be the most bang for the buck, so I added them first.