toward balanced and colorful delimiters

Emacs has the very useful feature of blinking the corresponding left "(" when you type its partner ")" (and the same for other delimiters like "[]", "{}" etc., depending on the mode). This is very useful for programming, especially for languages like Lisp and Scheme and the like.


Further help can come from tools like autopair or paredit – although the latter is a bit too much bondage & discipline for me, many people love it.
Anyway, recently I discovered a new helper in the quest for balance in delimited universe: rainbow-delimiters. With this package, the delimiters all get different colors based on their nesting level. It works wonderfully well.
Installation is straightforward:

• download rainbow-delimiters and put it in your load-path
• add something like the following in your .emacs:

(when (require 'rainbow-delimiters nil 'noerror) 
  (add-hook 'scheme-mode-hook 'rainbow-delimiters-mode))

That's it – of course you'll need to do the equivalent for modes where you'd like to enable it. See the screenshot below – maybe a bit too colorful for some people, but I like it and I have found it actually useful to see the corresponding delimiters without having to move the cursor over them.

I already added some nice Zenburn colors for this to the Zenburn theme for Emacs-24, as can be seen in the screenshot.

porting the zenburn theme to emacs 24

Just a small note: I already mentioned the zenburn color theme a couple of times. I have now ported the full (big) set of customizations to the emacs-24 format – find it at github; so if you run emacs 24 (the development version) and enjoy zenburn like me, you can give it try. Suggestions, additions are welcome.

Note, there seems to be a limitation with the :inherit-attribute for themes – in practice it means that some aspects of the theme may not work if a package sets the face before the theme does. Therefore, best to load the theme early from your .emacs or init.el; or alternatively visit the theme file (zenburn-theme.el in this case) and evaluate the buffer.