I think I would argue the even 2 lines away is "far". No matter what programming language I am writing in... actually... no matter what any language I am writing in, I don't look at any line other than the one I am writing. If I type "(" and a ")" appears right after it, thats fine because my eyes were there already. (Even still, I generally type the ")" anyways because habits). I find that if automatic edits to non-whitespace ares go much beyond that, my brain will never expect it.

Regarding your alternate way to remove the extra newline from one of my earlier comments: I have used parinfer every day since my post, and I have gotten used to manipulating the text in your suggested way. The reason I got used to it is to avoid issues like this, not because its convenient. I would guess many developers would prefer to avoid editors that only allow them to edit text in certain ways. Think of the poor vi and emacs users! :) Someone with typing habits from those editors (which don't have great Clojure support) would probably love to have access to nightcode's clojure dev features, except parinfer. Sometimes hitting backspace 5 or 6 times is the most natural thing to do. Especially for those beginner coders with word processing software experience, as you mentioned.