exactly. in Doom Emacs (and an appropriately configured vim), you can surround the word under the cursor with brackets with ysiw] where the last character is the bracket you want. it’s incredibly fast (especially combined with motion commands, you can do these faster than you can think) and very easy to learn, if you know vim.

and I think that last bit is where the educational branch of our industry massively fucked up. a good editor that works exactly how you like (and I like the vim command language for realtime control and lisp for configuration) is like an electrician’s screwdriver or another semi-specialized tool. there’s a million things you can do with it, but we don’t teach any of them to programmers. there’s no vim or emacs class, and I’ve seen the quality of your average bootcamp’s vscode material. your average programmer bounces between fad editors depending on what’s being marketed at the time, and right now LLMs are it. learning to use your tools is considered a snobby elitist thing, but it really shouldn’t be — I’d gladly trade all of my freshman CS classes for a couple semesters learning how to make vim and emacs sing and dance.

and now we’re trapped in this industry where our professionals never learned to use a screwdriver properly, so instead they bring their nephew to test for live voltage by licking the wires. and when you tell them to stop electrocuting their nephew and get the fuck out of your house, they get this faraway look in their eyes and start mumbling about how you’re just jealous that their nephew is going to become god first, because of course it’s also a weirdo cult underneath it all, that’s what happens when you vilify the concept of knowing fuck all about anything.