Check out this video for a quick demo: http://emacsrocks.com/e14.html
If you know a Lisp I recommend just giving paredit a spin for a few minutes, it's an interesting experience.
If you know a Lisp I recommend just giving paredit a spin for a few minutes, it's an interesting experience.
Calling it a "reflex" is an interesting phrase! Tools like magit let me encode complicated processes into muscle memory, in a way where retrieval doesn't have to go through remembering and typing a string. Structural editing is similar.
It's about typing code, as opposed to typing text, with all the structural, highlighting, auto-formatting, auto-completion, error-detection, etc advantages this brings.
Now it just feels vaguely annoying to work without it. It's fine, it's just one of those ergonomic changes that nags at you a bit. Kind of like the opposite of that feeling of taking off uncomfortable business clothes at the end of the day. Or what I imagine people who are better at vim than me keep talking about.