@chris: smartparens is not really friendly to modal editing am I right? as in lots of Ctrl / Alt etc?

I live evil-lisp-state except for two things: there’s no keybinding to go from Insert mode back to lisp-mode, and there’s no keybinding to go from Normal mode to lisp-mode either (that is, without SPC k)

i’ve found evil-lisp-state to be pretty clunky. Look into lispy, it’s pretty eye opening in my experience.

interesting. how do you invoke lispy-mode ?

or do you use the C- and C-M- bindings?