Paredit has lots of great ways to do that sort of thing, though, while keeping things balanced. In emacs with paredit, providing a prefix argument to open paren

Paredit has lots of great ways to do that sort of thing, though, while keeping things balanced. In emacs with paredit, providing a prefix argument to open paren lets you surround n sexps in the new parens. There's also slurp and barf to move sexps in and out of parens. Editing for lisp mirrors the language as a whole in that there's a learning curve, but once you've climbed it, it's a joy to work with. Because the syntax is so uniform, all you need is a handful of extensions/commands for full blown structural editing. I get by splendidly in emacs with nothing but paredit and convenient keybindings(not a huge fan of paredit defaults).