Re: web-mode.el

[Dmitry Gutov]

Hi François,

> As it is my first experience with emacs lisp programming, I would be
> really grateful to receive your feedbacks on any aspect of this mode
> (core programming, function/var naming, conventions, etc.). For many
> aspects, I wonder if I use hacks or correct ways to do the job (ex. I
> look at the face name in my indent function to know if (point) is in a
> comment or a string).

To address the last point, you'd usually call (syntax-ppss) and
examine the returned value. `M-x describe-function parse-partial-sexp`
for its format.

> I will also publish a web page which will look like this:
> http://fxbois.free.fr/lisp/web-mode.html
>
> Perhaps you also have comments about it.

I don't write PHP, so I'm definitely not going to use it, but you may be
interested in this addition to mmm-mode I wrote last weekend:

https://github.com/purcell/mmm-mode/blob/master/mmm-erb.el

Basically, it provides syntax highlighting and smart indentation,
supporting CSS, JS and ERB/EJS subregions. And utility commands already
present in html-mode.

It reuses submodes' indent-line-functions, so extending it to support
PHP, for example, shouldn't be much harder than writing a few regexps
for `mmm-add-group` and `mmm-add-classes` and a scanning function like
`mmm-erb-scan-erb`. That's provided, of course, we'll have some php-mode
package to work with.

mmm-mode is rather heavy, so speed might become an issue with large
files, but it should have room for optimization.

-- Dmitry