With just these four things you will be 95% there, enjoying the fruits of paredit without any complexity — all the remaining tricks you can learn later when you feel like you’re fluent.
<rant> It's not so much the editing itself but the unfamiliarity of the ecosystem. It seems it's a square-peg I've been crafting a round hole of habits for it:
I guess I should use emacs? How to even configure it such that these actions are available? Or maybe I should write a plugin for helix so that I can be in a familiar environment. Oh, but the helix plugin language is a scheme, so I guess I'll use emacs until I can learn scheme better and then write that plugin. Oh but emacs keybinds are conflicting with what I've configured for zellij, maybe I can avoid conflicts by using evil mode? Oh ok, emacs-lisp, that's a thing. Hey symex seems like it aligns with my modal brain, oh but there goes another afternoon of fussing with emacs. Found and reported a symex "bug" but apparently it only appears in nix-governed environments so I guess I gotta figure out how to report the packaging bug (still todo). Also, I guess I might as well figure out how to get emacs to evaluate expressions based on which ones are selected, since that's one of the fun things you can do in lisps, but there's no plugin for the scheme that helix is using for its plugin language (which is why I'm learning scheme in the first place), but it turns out that AI is weirdly good at configuring emacs so now my emacs config contains most that that plugin would entail. Ok, now I'm finally ready to learn scheme, I've got this big list of new actions to learn: https://countvajhula.com/2021/09/25/the-animated-guide-to-sy.... Slurp, barf, and raise you say? excellent, I'll focus on those.
I'm not actually trying to critique the unfamiliar space. These are all self inflicted wounds: me being persnickety about having it my way. It's just usually not so difficult to use something new and also have it my way.</rant>
Don't do that. ;)
Emacs is a graphical application! Don't use it in the terminal unless you really have to (i.e., you're using it on a remote machine and TRAMP will not do).
> it turns out that AI is weirdly good at configuring emacs
I was just chatting with a friend about this. ChatGPT seems to be much better at writing ELisp than many other languages I've asked it to work with.
Also while you're playing with it, you might be interested in checking out kakoune.el or meow, which provide modal editing in Emacs but with the selection-first ordering for commands, like in Kakoune and Helix rather than the old vi way.
PS: symex looks really interesting! Hadn't been that one