Re: [AUCTeX] A bug to add a pair of braces and more?

[Adam Johnson]

> On Tue, Oct 31, 2006 at 05:44:25PM -0600, Adam Johnson wrote:
> ...
> > Just a thought, can you please produce any operation to delete a pair of
> > braces, that is to change "{blabla}" to "blabla"?  In general, an extra
> > pair of "{}" will not affect anything, but I'd like to keep my document 
> as
> > neat as possible.  (that is, without extra things like this in the
> > document.)
>
> Very good idea.  Most often I would like to delete such a pair of
> surrounding braces after auctex inserted them automatically for
> sub/superscripts.  Removing braces around one letter sub/superscripts
> might be an improvement to electric sub/superscripts.

Actually, I do like the the braces around the sub/superscripts for either 
single or multiple letters, which looks more formal in my viewpoint.  You 
can set TeX-electric-sub-and-superscript to deactive it if you are in such a 
case a lot.

If this really bothers you or somebody else, how about the following idea to 
implement it?  Use another switch, for example, 
TeX-minibuffer-sub-and-superscript, if it is turned ON and 
TeX-electric-sub-and-superscript IS TURNED ON, then when you input a _ or ^ 
in a math environment, you will be prompted to type the super or subscripts 
in the minibuffer:
a. if only one letter, after press "Enter", there is no extra {} surrounds 
it and the cursor will follow it.
b. if more than one letter, then a pair of {} is added and the cursor will 
be out of the {}.
c. if empty, then back to normal, a pair of {} is added, the cursor is put 
inside the {}, so people can type their own (may be longer) super/subscript?


Or extend the current TeX-electric-sub-and-superscript to FOUR modes:
0 -- As the current status, turn it off, users type {} as they like in the 
Emacs buffer directly.
1 -- As the current status, add a {} after _ or ^ always, and put the cursor 
inside the braces.
2 -- Use the minibuffer to type the super/subscripts and add the {} only for 
multiple letters; cursor will be placed after your input or }; emtpy or 
white space input to the minibuffer will go back the normal buffer and 
operate same as 0  (not sure whether it is useful or not, but no hurt at 
least?)
3 -- Use the minibuffer to type the super/subscripts and add the {} only for 
multiple letters; cursor will be placed after your input or }; emtpy or 
white space input to the minibuffer will go back the normal buffer and 
operate same as 1


For my case, one example is that sometimes I use \textcolor{red}{a big 
blahblah paragraph} for a draft file to emphasize some parts in color.  When 
I try to remove these colored texts,  I can find "\textcolor{red}{" easily 
and remove them, but the matched closing brace "}" may be difficult.  
Sometimes, I'd like to just remove "\textcolor{red}", and keep an extra "{}" 
without error.  But I do prefer to removing the extra {} as well if some 
easy operation can find it and remove it.


--
Adam

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