Move up and down scopes / expressions

[thomasheartman]

Emacs's smartparens package has commands that move you up/down/to next/to previous expression (sp-*-sexp functions, such as sp-backward-up-sexp, sp-previous-sexp, etc). They're quite similar to Emacs's native down-list, backward-up-list, etc.

From the doc string for sp-backward-up-sexp:

Move backward out of one level of parentheses.

From the doc string for down-list:

Move forward down one level of parentheses.
This command will also work on other parentheses-like expressions
defined by the current language mode.

In effect, this lets you move to an enclosing scope, down a scope, to next item etc. I think Zed has a chance to do something very similar through tree-sitter. Zed already exposes SelectLargerSyntaxNode as an action, but it doesn't expose a dedicated movement function.

I'm not super familiar with tree-sitter, but I imagine Zed could introduce something like "Next/PreviousSyntaxNodeSameLevel", "LargerSyntaxNode", "SmallerSyntaxNode" to achieve very similar results. As a bonus, this also makes it very easy to delete syntax nodes like this and could be very useful in vim mode (long time evil mode user 🙋🏼 ) as motions/text objects (delete around larger syntax node, etc)

While this kind of movement excels in lisps, it's also really useful for navigating JSON and general C-like languages.