How do I get “rainbow parentheses” in emacs?

Question

I would like rainbow parens for editing Clojure in Emacs and since VI does this I assume that in Emacs it should be something like M-x butterfly or something :)

Answer 1

This is an old question now, but I recently wrote RainbowDelimiters mode for this. It's a 'rainbow parens'-type mode which colors all parens, brackets and braces, made with Clojure programming in mind.

It highlights the whole buffer, not just the parens surrounding point.

The most important thing is that it's FAST - all the other rainbow paren modes I've tried slow down editing (especially scrolling) quite a lot. I put significant effort into profiling and optimizing it so doesn't have any noticeable impact on scrolling/editing speed.

You can find info about it at the EmacsWiki page, and the mode itself is at rainbow-delimiters.el.

Answer 2

Here's a mode for that which I have used in the past briefly. Here's another one which I haven't tried.

Answer 3

I'm using highlight-parentheses-mode from the script mquander mentioned. It doesn't provide much of a rainbow effect out of the box, but it is customisable:

(setq hl-paren-colors
      '(;"#8f8f8f" ; this comes from Zenburn
                   ; and I guess I'll try to make the far-outer parens look like this
        "orange1" "yellow1" "greenyellow" "green1"
        "springgreen1" "cyan1" "slateblue1" "magenta1" "purple"))

I believe I've lifted the actual colours from Vimclojure. Note that Vimclojure highlights all parentheses in the file, whereas with highlight-parentheses-mode only the parens which actually contain the point will be highlighted (and only a limited number of levels). I happen to find this behaviour useful, but it is perhaps a bit lacking in the prettiness area in comparison with the Vimclojure way.

I now notice I've never gotten 'round to fixing those outer paren colours actually... Maybe I will now that you've reminded me about it.