Re: Do shorthands break basic tooling (tags, grep, etc)? (was Re: Shorthands have landed on master)

[Gregory Heytings]

> > > The name known to Emacs is "string-library-foo" (or whatever).
> > >
> > > The user types "C-h o s-foo RET" and Emacs says "no match".
>
> If the user switches to a buffer which contains a Lisp program that 
> requires s, then types C-h o s-foo RET, or C-h f s-foo RET, I think it 
> would make sense for it to find s-foo.

That's yet another problem introduced by that system.  Suppose a user has 
an Emacs session opened, with two windows: the top one contains a buffer 
with a (require 'string-library) and a elisp-shorthands (("s-" . 
"string-library-")), and the bottom one contains a text buffer.  Now:

(1) If the currently selected window is the top one:

(1.1) If point is on s-foo, C-h o will suggest string-library-foo.  So far 
so good.

(1.2) If the user is not on s-foo, C-h o s - f o o RET will currently 
return "No match".  Unless of course an s-foo function or variable defined 
is already defined elsewhere, in which case it's that function or variable 
that will be found, and the user will get a possibly wrong information. 
That could perhaps be fixed by copying the value of elisp-shorthands in 
the minibuffer buffer-local variables, in which case s-foo will 
automatically be expanded into string-library-foo.  The same would be 
necessary for M-:, C-h f, C-h v, and perhaps M-x.

(1.3) The fix in (1.2) would however break another use case: the buffer in 
the top window was entered with M-., the function that is visible does not 
use any of the string-library functions, which means that the user does 
not know that s-foo expands into string-library-foo.  What they actually 
want is perhaps to see the documentation of the s-foo function or variable 
that they know and that is defined elsewhere, and C-h o s - f o o RET will 
display the documentation of string-library-foo instead.

(1.4) The fix in (1.2) would also not be enough when recursive minibuffers 
enter the scene, see (2).

(1.5) If the fix in (1.2) is not used for M-x, M-x s-frobnicate will not 
expand into string-library-frobnicate.  If the fix in (1.2) is used for 
M-x, M-x s-mode will become M-x string-library-mode.  Both are obviously 
problematic.

(2) If the currently selected window is not the top one (it is either in 
the minibuffer or in the bottom window), C-h o s - f o o will again return 
"No match", unless of course an s-foo function or variable is already 
defined elsewhere, in which case the user will get a wrong information.