# Parinfer

8 Hacker News commenters recommended Parinfer and 0 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 3 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** Free editor plugin that matches Lisp parentheses from indentation, so you edit code without managing closing parens by hand.

## Why people recommend it

- Matches parens from indentation (2 comments): "allows me to edit Janet as if it was an indentation-based language" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48368661)) "something like parinfer, which matches parens based on indentation" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49881115))
- Avoids manual paren management (2 comments): "Having to keep the source in the shape of a valid AST almost entirely manually is really annoying." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48382580)) "parinfer shows it can be done mostly non-annoyingly at least for lisp" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48389113))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Evil mode for Emacs](https://hackerapproved.com/p/evil-mode.md): 39 recommend
- [TRAMP for Emacs](https://hackerapproved.com/p/tramp.md): 25 recommend
- [SLIME](https://hackerapproved.com/p/slime.md): 19 recommend
- [Vertico](https://hackerapproved.com/p/vertico.md): 18 recommend
- [Eglot](https://hackerapproved.com/p/eglot.md): 16 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Parinfer", https://hackerapproved.com/p/parinfer/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).