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Subject: |
23.0.93; Use punctuation syntax for apostrophe in Info |
Date: |
Sat, 16 May 2009 15:02:51 -0700 |
I don't know if this would be appropriate for all Info manuals, but at
least for Emacs, Elisp, Eintr, and Efaq it makes sense, I think.
Apostrophe, or single quote, (') currently has word-constituent syntax
in Info, which it inherits from text-mode.
This means that if point is inside some `...' string, and you use
`C-s C-w', you will pick up also the ' at the end as part of the
search string, which is typically not what you want.
If the syntax class for ' were `punctuation' instead of `word', then
you could more easily pick up key sequences, function names, and
variable names that are quoted: `C-x C-x' or `char-syntax', for
example.
Yes, you can today pick up everything, including the ` and the ', by
positioning the cursor on the `, but if you want just the quoted
content or some suffix of it, and not the quoting delimiters, you
get the ' too, which is not what you want.
If this makes sense for all Info manuals, then a simple fix would
presumably be to change this (in the definition of `info-mode'):
(set-syntax-table text-mode-syntax-table)
To this:
(set-syntax-table
(copy-syntax-table text-mode-syntax-table))
(modify-syntax-entry ?' ".")
I don't know much about text-mode, but I wonder if even there it might
make sense for ' to have syntax class `punctuation' instead of
`word'. Probably the answer is "no", or that would already be the
case. ;-)
I see this in `text-mode.el':
;; We add `p' so that M-c on 'hello' leads to 'Hello'
;; rather than 'hello'.
(modify-syntax-entry ?' "w p" st)
That explains why p was added, but not why ' should have syntax class
w at all. Again, there probably is a good reason, but I don't know
what it is. After changing the syntax to punctuation, M-c still seems
to act as desired on 'hello'.
In GNU Emacs 23.0.93.1 (i386-mingw-nt5.1.2600)
of 2009-05-02 on SOFT-MJASON
Windowing system distributor `Microsoft Corp.', version 5.1.2600
configured using `configure --with-gcc (3.4)'
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--- Begin Message ---
Subject: |
Re: bug#3312: 23.0.93; Use punctuation syntax for apostrophe in Info |
Date: |
Sun, 18 Sep 2011 22:57:08 +0300 |
User-agent: |
Gnus/5.13 (Gnus v5.13) Emacs/24.0.50 (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu) |
> Yes, it might be a good idea to change it in Info-mode, which is quite
> different from text-mode because of the extensive use of `...' and the
> fact that it's read-only.
Fixed and closed.
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