Rainbow brackets in Emacs
2015-04-11
You know something that really annoys me? When I'm writing some Racket, Clojure, or any other Lispy language, and my editor won't cooperate. Emacs is far, far, better than most other editors for this sort of thing, mostly due to paredit-mode and SLIME (and geiser-mode, and clojure-mode, and evil-mode, and...), but there's still one problem I hadn't solved until recently.
Matching up sets of parentheses.
I know what you're thinking, a quick 2 second Google search would have
told me to install rainbow-delimiters, and I did, with
M-x package-install RET rainbow-delimiters RET. Then I added it to
my .emacs file:
(require 'rainbow-delimiters)
(global-rainbow-delimiters-mode)
And that was that. Or was it? Take a look at this:
How can you tell the colours apart when they're so...gray?
How could I fix that? All the colours look the same! I don't want have to set all the colours manually, I just want to programatically make all of the colours brighter and less drab and indistinguishable from each other. Is that so much to ask?
It turns out that it's not, and there's an easy way to do that, just
M-x package-install RET cl-lib RET (although you might already have
it) and add the following to your .emacs (after requiring
rainbow-delimiters):
(require 'cl-lib)
(require 'color)
(cl-loop
for index from 1 to rainbow-delimiters-max-face-count
do
(let ((face (intern (format "rainbow-delimiters-depth-%d-face" index))))
(cl-callf color-saturate-name (face-foreground face) 30)))
That increases the saturation on all the colours to the maximum, so they look nice and bright.
Much better.