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11:23 AM
Hi everyone! So I've moved from the Wolfram stack to another one for work reasons (mostly python and... excel). And I must say, one of the features I miss the most from the notebook interface is the smart highlighting, where a double-click automagically highlights more and more external structures in brackets or parentheses. The highlighter also respects operators as separators, so useful for separating sum terms. I was wondering, is there a concise term for this "smart highlighter"?
I was trying to look for plugins that might do this for my IDEs (or Excel... one can dream), but my search terms turned out not much...
I can't believe the text-editing ecosystem is still sleeping on this feature! Well, I know that you can double-click to select words, but most editors stop at recognizing spaces as separators. Not ideal for code-centric workflows...
 
 
4 hours later…
3:24 PM
@Musang This functionality exists in emacs at least, with a package called expand-region: github.com/magnars/expand-region.el
 
3:51 PM
Thanks @CarlLange. This helps. Should have known that the OGs would have this implemented. Also: github.com/tpope/vim-surround
 
4:32 PM
Indeed, also in emacs as evil-surround :) It looks like the VSCode vim emulation layer also has something similar: https://github.com/VSCodeVim/Vim#vim-surround
Thanks for pointing it out though, somehow I've been missing it for years in my emacs config. I suppose it's particularly useful in Mathematica though, with dozens of nested calls. Also in s-expression based languages. Not sure how often I'd use it in python...
 

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