Re: [AUCTeX-devel] Support for expl3

[Mosè Giordano]

Hi Sean,

2015-04-03 5:20 GMT+02:00 Sean Allred <address@hidden>:
> Thanks for everything so far, guys. Simply being able to correctly jump 
> around by token is a great help :)
>
> Building off of what was provided here, I’ve taken the liberty of adding some 
> font-locking with the help of the awesome folks over at Emacs.SE. I’ve 
> attached an ‘updated’ expl3.el to this email (I can’t get git-diff to 
> cooperate, for some reason). I abstracted the anonymous hook-function into a 
> named function (that’s still added as a hook). In this function, I’ve added 
> font-locking for regular expression variables I set just above it.

Thanks for the contribution, looks promising!

> I would welcome any feedback / suggestions as I hope to have this included in 
> the official distribution.

As David already remembered, you and anyone sensibly helped you must
sign copyright assignments for the style file to be included in
AUCTeX.

> However, I worry that a simple style file might not be enough for no-joking 
> expl3 editing support: In addition to a different highlighting scheme, there 
> is at least one input difference that causes concern. The way to input a 
> literal space in expl3 is to use `~` – in the past, I’ve used my own 
> poor-man’s minor mode to control whether SPC inserts a space or a tilde. 
> (When writing error messages, you like to include as many helpful words as 
> you can – all of these words are separated by these literal spaces (~).) Gets 
> a little tedious with the shift key and all (on US-English keyboards).

A minor mode hooked into AUCTeX may be indeed the solution: you
activate it when you want to write expl3 code, turn it off to come
back to write good ol' LaTeX code.

> There may very well be those actually on the project who disagree with me 
> (and I’ve raised the question in the TeX StackExchange chatroom [1]), but I 
> think it may be appropriate to add expl3 as a separate TeX dialect. In an 
> ideal world, no expl3 code will appear in LaTeX documents – it should be 
> gathered together in its own file. Would a patch to remove the style file and 
> use dialects be welcome? (I haven’t ever messed with different dialects in 
> AUCTeX, but I’m willing to learn.)

How do you think a separate dialect would be helpful?

Bye,
Mosè