If you edit s-expressions as text then yes, it's horrible. If you edit s-expressions as data structures using something like paredit you'll actually code very

If you edit s-expressions as text then yes, it's horrible. If you edit s-expressions as data structures using something like paredit you'll actually code very quickly, and it'll also be impossible to have unbalanced parens. Say you have this (| = cursor): (a b |c d) If you type ( you get balanced parens: (a b ()| c d) If you press Ctrl+Right twice you slurp in c and d: (a b (c| d)) If you then press Alt+Up you get back to: (a b c| d) As you can see, you manipulate code on the level of data structures instead of manually placing parentheses, and you are actually prevented from making unbalanced parens in paredit. You can likewise move through code in ways similar to moving by word or paragraph in vim vs moving by character, but I only showed basic editing above. I won't downvote you because I understand your complaint. But the problem is that you are unaware that you are using the wrong mode of editing for s-expressions. :) It's like editing photo using a hex editor: possible, but very much suboptimal.