You don’t have to miss that functionality in Org Mode! You can get it from smart-parens (which is all around great and I recommend using in every mode, not just Org!).
You can setup the Org Mode font specifiers to be smart-parens delimiter pairs and then you can select some text and then press ’/’ or ’*’ or etc. to wrap the selection; use sp-rewrap-sexp to change the innermost font specifiers (I bind this to `C-(` which I think of as “change (what kind of) parenthesis”); and use sp-splice-sexp to remove the innermost font specifier.
– Omar 2016-10-10 23:43 UTC