Thanks for the information. The feature you have described is not exactly what I was after originally, but it seems like it will probably be useful so I have enabled it.
What I was after was something that actually inserts the closing brackets for you to help ensure the brackets remain matched.
The ParEdit extension that Timur described is exactly what I was after.
- Adam [2009-02-05 11:47+0100] writes:
/ Hi,
/>/ I'm setting up emacs/slime for the first time and I'm having some />/ difficulties getting automatic bracket matching to work. I watched Marco />/ Baringer's lisp video and I've got most of the useful features working />/ like tab auto-completion and hyperspec lookup for example, but brackets />/ don't seem to matched automatically like they were in Marco's video. />/ For example whenever an opening bracket was typed a closing bracket />/ would be inserted after the cursor, but this doesn't happen in my />/ emacs/slime configuration. / Paren matching is a standard Emacs feature not something specific to Slime. You can enable it with something like (show-paren-mode t) in your .emacs. Depending on the Emacs version, there is also an item the "Options" menu. `M-x customize-option show-paren-mode' will also work. In Emcas 23 it's enable by default.
There is also a slightly different feature called "paren blinking" which moves the cursor temporarily back to the opening paren when the closing ) is inserted. That's useful if you work on a black&white terminal.
Helmut.