Paredit: Fixing Unbalanced Parentheses

2025-09-27

A very important Emacs skill that not enough people talk about is how to fix your code when you're using paredit and your parentheses become unbalanced. I remember when I first started using paredit, this was a problem I'd run into occasionally, and I did not know how to fix it. Instead of dealing with a malfunctioning paredit, I decided to not use paredit for a long time which was a shame, because structural editing in Lisp is great. Here are a few techniques I've come up with to recover from this unbalanced state so that you can continue to use paredit happily.

Temporarily Disable paredit

• Hit M-x paredit to temporarily disable paredit.

• Find where the missing parenthesis belongs and insert it.

• Using M-x check-parens can be helpful in this situation.

• Hit M-x paredit to reenable paredit.

Evil Users, use C-v in insert mode.

If you're an evil user, you don't have to temporarily disable paredit. Just find where the missing parenthesis needs to go and hit C-v ) while in insert mode to force insertion of the ")" character.

Balance Restored

Once all the parentheses are balanced, paredit should resume functioning properly again.