How to Quickly Get evil-mc Working With Smartparens

17 March, 2021

A quick and dirty way of getting Emacs' evil-mc and smartparens packages to play nicely together, so you can use multiple cursors with s-expression editing.

evil-mc is great for working with multiple cursors and smartparens is great for working with lispy s-expressions. But can they work nicely together without putting in a lot of effort writing glue between the two?

It turns out that they can! By my estimate, this simple approach works for 90% of the use cases:

(after! (:and evil-mc smartparens)
  (dolist (sp-command '(sp-up-sexp
                        sp-copy-sexp
                        sp-down-sexp
                        sp-join-sexp
                        sp-kill-sexp
                        sp-next-sexp
                        sp-split-sexp
                        sp-wrap-curly
                        sp-wrap-round
                        sp-raise-sexp
                        sp-clone-sexp
                        sp-wrap-square
                        sp-splice-sexp
                        sp-end-of-sexp
                        sp-forward-sexp
                        sp-backward-sexp
                        sp-convolute-sexp
                        sp-transpose-sexp
                        sp-kill-whole-line
                        sp-beginning-of-sexp
                        sp-forward-barf-sexp
                        sp-forward-slurp-sexp
                        sp-backward-barf-sexp
                        sp-backward-slurp-sexp
                        sp-splice-sexp-killing-forward
                        sp-splice-sexp-killing-backward))
    (add-to-list
     'evil-mc-custom-known-commands
     `(,sp-command
       (:default . evil-mc-execute-call)))))

Not every smartparens command will work seamlessly with the virtual cursors from evil-mc (the sp-wrap family are particularly quirky) but they all do work to some degree, which means you can still get things done quicker — now with the power of both packages!