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Easy traversal of customize groups
From: |
Etienne Prud’homme |
Subject: |
Easy traversal of customize groups |
Date: |
Fri, 23 Jun 2017 13:31:20 -0400 |
User-agent: |
Emacs/25.2 (gnu/linux) |
The Emacs customization system allows to group custom options. We use
something called a group that will contain all its customization members
(including other groups). Thus this makes a tree structure.
While customize groups are mostly used by “Custom-mode”, I find them
really convenient for splitting my init files. I use them so often that
I made a small hack library that shows the paths of a group (a group can
have multiple parents).
However, I noticed that figuring out the paths for a group can be quite
hungry. It may not be noticeable when using “Custom-mode”, but to find
the parents of a group, we actually use `mapatoms' to iterate over all
known symbols. The symbol has a corresponding plist (list of
properties).
In order to make a group parent of another group, the parent group
symbol property list must include a property in the form of:
([children-group] custom-group)
That’s more or less the same way members of the group are stored.
Storing a reference to group members like that is not a problem when
traversing a tree from the root. However, it can become really
inefficient when trying to resolve the group’s parent. E.g.
If I’m in group ‘info’, I must map over all known symbols to guess its
parents.
So now, here’s my proposal: adding a property to link parents in the
child group property list. This would allow efficient traversal of
customization groups and why not printing a tree of the current
customization option.
The drawback would be increased memory usage, but I find it negligible
when we see the performance improvement.
--
Etienne
- Easy traversal of customize groups,
Etienne Prud’homme <=