Re: dwim as the value of TeX-master

[Tassilo Horn]

Hongyi Zhao <hongyi.zhao@gmail.com> writes:

> The AUCTeX document on
> <https://www.gnu.org/software/auctex/manual/auctex/Multifile.html>
> says the following:
>
> If the variable is dwim, AUCTeX will try to avoid querying by
> attempting to “do what I mean”; and then change the file.
>
> But I'm still not so clear on the specific mechanism/algorithm denoted
> by “do what I mean”.

AUCTeX will look at the TeX-master values in all buffers whose file
reside in the same directory as the current one and use the first
TeX-master value which is a string (and so denotes the path to the
master file).  That's based on the assumption that one usually has a
layout like

  main.tex # The master file where TeX-master is t which includes
           # the individual chapter files.
  chapter1.tex # TeX-master is "main.tex"
  chapter2.tex # TeX-master is "main.tex"

So when you now create a new chapter3.tex, it will most probably also
want to have TeX-master set to "main.tex".

Obviously, this dwim method can do wrong guesses when you have multiple
multi-file documents in the same directory and work on several of them
at once.

HTH,
Tassilo