Re: Upcoming loss of usability of Emacs source files and Emacs.

[Oleh Krehel]

Oleh Krehel <address@hidden> writes:

> Alan Mackenzie <address@hidden> writes:
>
>> My view is that the curly quotes should not replace 0x60 and 0x27 in our
>> sources, but that the option to display them as curly quotes should be
>> made available to those that want it.
>
> I completely agree. I often search sources using "`" and "'" in a
> regex. Now it's hard to type that in.
>
> Additionally, I actually like to see "`" and "'" displayed. So if there
> was an option to turn off "‘" visually, I would do it in my config.

As I saw the (subjectively) ugly new quotation chars already being used
in Emacs commit messages, I finally took the time to learn how display
tables work. So for all people who actually like how the old-style
quotation looks, this is how to replace visually all new-style quotation
with old-style:

    (let ((tbl (make-display-table)))
      (aset tbl 8220 (vector (make-glyph-code ?\" 'default)))
      (aset tbl 8221 (vector (make-glyph-code ?\" 'default)))
      (aset tbl 8216 (vector (make-glyph-code ?\` 'default)))
      (aset tbl 8217 (vector (make-glyph-code ?\' 'default)))
      (setq standard-display-table tbl))

While we're on the subject of modifying the source code purely for
aesthetics, I wanted to bring up the subject of Elisp indentation rules.
But then I saw http://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=20323, from
which it appears that the problem is solved for two months already
(although without a NEWS entry). Thanks to Dmitry for the change. There
are still issues of `lisp-indent-function' being inferior to
`common-lisp-indent-function' in some cases, but I can report them
later.