Rainbow Delimiters is a “rainbow parentheses”-like mode which highlights parentheses, brackets, and braces according to their depth. Each successive level is highlighted in a different color. This makes it easy to spot matching delimiters, orient yourself in the code, and tell which statements are at a given depth.
Great care has been taken to make this mode fast. You shouldn’t see any change in scrolling or editing speed when it's on even when working in delimiter-rich languages like Clojure or Emacs Lisp. It can be used with any language, and can be enabled editor-wide.
You can customize the colors rainbow-delimiters uses. The default colors are intentionally subtle; they are unobtrusive enough to make the mode worth looking at even if you usually don’t like rainbow parentheses modes. A number of major color themes such as Zenburn and Solarized have added their own faces for the mode.
This is the official github repository for rainbow-delimiters.
The latest release of rainbow-delimiters.el is always found here:
Further information is available on the EmacsWiki page:
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Place rainbow-delimiters.el on your emacs load-path.
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Compile the file (necessary for speed):
M-x byte-compile-file [location of rainbow-delimiters.el] -
Add the following to your dot-emacs/init file:
(require 'rainbow-delimiters) -
Activate the mode in your init file.
You can choose to enable it only for specific modes, or Emacs-wide:
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To enable it only in certain modes, add lines like the following:
(add-hook 'clojure-mode-hook 'rainbow-delimiters-mode) -
To enable it in all programming-related emacs modes (Emacs 24+):
(add-hook 'prog-mode-hook 'rainbow-delimiters-mode) -
To activate the mode globally, add to your init file:
(global-rainbow-delimiters-mode) -
To temporarily activate rainbow-delimiters mode in an open buffer:
M-x rainbow-delimiters-mode
Additional discussion is at the top of the file and on the EmacsWiki page linked to above.