Re: tutorial on faces ?

[Jean-Christophe Helary]

> On Feb 7, 2019, at 1:45, Drew Adams <drew.adams@oracle.com> wrote:
> 
>> Well, I'm tweaking poker.el at the moment and I'm looking for ways to
>> apply style to some parts of the messages.
>> 
>> Honestly, the elisp manual gives me no idea how to do that...
> 
> OK, good.  But what do you mean by "style"?
> Do you mean that you want to apply a face to some
> parts of some messages?

That's correct.

Coming from a HTML+CSS background, I thought that I could find a way to:

1) define some styles (for ex. "poker-action" as an already defined emacs 
standard style)

2) select the strings that need style (for ex "folds|calls|checks|raises")

3) apply the "poker-action" style to the defined selected strings

I was thus looking for a way to define styles, a way to select strings (or 
positions) and a way to apply the style to the selected strings.


> If so:
> 
> 1. Do you want to apply the face to the buffer
>   _positions_ of those msg parts, as an _overlay_
>   property, or do you want to apply it to the
>   _characters_ of those msg parts, as a _text_
>   property?

I don't know which is more appropriate to what I have.

> 2. Are those message parts recognizable/definable
>   in a regular way, i.e., as something that you
>   can define using one or more regexps?

Yes.

>  And do
>   you want the face highlighting to be
>   automatically reapplied to those parts when
>   the same text is visited anew (in the same
>   mode), e.g. in a new Emacs session or after
>   reverting the buffer?

I'm not sure I understand the question.

The way I've tweaked poker.el makes it (insert) strings that indicate player 
actions and results into a dedicated buffer. I'd like the buffer to always 
display the same style while the buffer exists.

There are some echo line (message) strings but I'm fine without having them 
styled.

>   If the answer is yes then look at using
>   `font-lock-mode' to define and highlight those
>   parts.  If the answer is no then maybe look
>   at using ad hoc highlighting, such as you get
>   with library `highlight.el':
> 
>   https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/HighlightLibrary

So I guess the answer is Yes.

> Knowing the answers to these, and perhaps other,
> questions might help you direct your search for
> tutorials (e.g. whether to look for tutorials
> that involve font-lock highlighting).
> 
> The more you can specify about what you're
> interested in, the more helpful people and search
> can be.

Jean-Christophe Helary
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http://mac4translators.blogspot.com @brandelune