How to highlight region enclosed by parentheses in vim?

Question

Is there a way to automatically highlight the region enclosed by parentheses when the cursor goes over that region?

Take the following text as an example:

(define (example x)
  (cond ((string? x) (display x))
             (else (error "Bad" x))))

when the cursor goes above the cond, this particular region should be immediately highlighted (i.e. there should be no need to press any keys to achieve highlighting):

(cond ((string? x) (display x))
           (else (error "Bad" x))))

Useful screenshot from something similar in emacs: https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/HighlightSexps

I believe this highlighting feature will make reading s-expressions (basically Racket, Scheme, Clojure, Common Lisp code) a lot easier.

How can this highlighting be achieved in vim?

Answer 1

You can use va( (start visual mode, select from the previous opening ( to the corresponding closing ), including (with i(: excluding) the parentheses themselves). To remove the highlighting and go back to where you were, use <Esc>``.

I know that this is only a partial solution, but this is what you can get with built-in functions. More than that would require a plugin, but I don't know whether such exists.