You can get quite close to "AST editing"-like experience if you just use the expand/shrink selection feature of a JetBrains IDE. It supports most mainstream lan

You can get quite close to "AST editing"-like experience if you just use the expand/shrink selection feature of a JetBrains IDE. It supports most mainstream languages. You just select a syntactic unit with opt-up/down, then u either type over it, copy/cut/past or press left or right to go to the beginning or the end of the selection, hence using the selection as an intermediate step achieving AST-level navigation. And of course you can teach Emacs to behave similarly, using the Expand Region (https://wikemacs.org/wiki/Expand_region https://wikemacs.org/wiki/Expand_region) + some hacks, but I agree, that smartparens also solves this problem quite well. UPDATE: also use avy-jump for emacs or acejump for intellij: https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/7086-acejump https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/7086-acejump these in combination with expand/shrink-region operations are a significant productivity boost, which is easy to learn and teach.