Indeed, I pretty much only go into vi-mode in vi itself to use %; the rest of the time, I remain an "ex" troglodyte whose only vi-commands are h, j, k, l (and arrow analogues), x, %, and most importantly gQ.  Yes, even when writing Lisp.

On Thu, Aug 23, 2018 at 12:05 AM Mark H Weaver <mhw@netris.org> wrote:
Hi again,

> Daniel Tam <danooo.tam@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> I've activated readline support for the Guile repl, but I've found that
>> if my inputrc enables vi-mode, then the bouncing parentheses feature
>> doesn't work. Disabling vi-mode does the trick.
>
> Indeed.  For some reason that I cannot determine, the bouncing
> parentheses feature is specifically disabled when the vi keymap is in
> use.

I think I now see the reason for it.  I noticed that readline's default
vi keymap includes a binding for '%', which jumps to the paren matching
the one under the cursor.  That reminded me, from many years ago when I
used vi more often, that this is the way that old vi traditionally
allows matching parens to be found.

So, I guess the decision long ago to disable bouncing parens when in vi
mode was to match the way that emacs and vi behaved at that time.

However, I just tried modern vim, and I see that it now highlights
matching parens by default.  So, we should probably remove the 'if' to
match this newer behavior.

       Mark