It's called rainbow delimiters and I use it with everything.

http://www.emacswiki.org/RainbowDelimiters

As for the unbalanced delimiters, I just M-x paredit-mode, turn it off, make my fixes (which is easy because rainbow delimiters shows me exactly which delimiter is out of place), and then turn it back on again.

An easier way to deal with unbalanced delimiters without toggling paredit-mode is to use C-q, quoted-insert. C-q ) inserts a literal ) where regular ) is bound to paredit-close-round.

Quoted insert is generally useful when you want to enter a specific character that is bound to something other than self-insert, such as a literal newline in a regex pattern.

Yep, C-q is also useful when you need to comment out part of a multiline sexp without doing a block select and C-; Otherwise paredit will helpfully move the comment to a newline to avoid breaking the balance ;)

Thankyou!

Not calling you wrong, but it looks like there were concerns about the competence of the contractors[0]. It was certainly paired with bad management, though.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2013/11/15/245399...