Re: [AUCTeX-devel] Default settings

[Tassilo Horn]

Florêncio Neves <address@hidden> writes:

Hi Florêncio,

> I think the following settings should become the default:
>
>   (add-hook 'LaTeX-mode-hook 'turn-on-reftex)
>   (setq reftex-plug-into-AUCTeX t)

As Uwe mentioned, reftex is a separate package on XEmacs, so it might
not be installed.  We could possibly check if it's available and if so,
enable it.  Though, in general, I think it's better to start out basic
and make it easy to enable things instead of starting out big and making
it hard for users that don't want a particular feature to disable it
again.

>   (setq-default TeX-PDF-mode t)

I have that too, but there are still good reasons why people use DVI
output.  All in all, I don't have a strong opinion here.

>   (setq TeX-parse-self t)

I agree with Mosè that basically anybody doing LaTeX editing want that
to be t, and then I'd say the parsing is fast enough.  However, there
are possibly Emacs users on systems that have AUCTeX installed that look
at some tex file only causually, and then it would be bad if the
defaults make that slow.

I've just tried running `TeX-auto-apply' on some large latex document
(that's what's called with `TeX-parse-self' set to t), and even on my
recent computer with an SSD, it takes about a second.  So it might
easily take several seconds on older computers.

>   (setq TeX-source-correlate-mode t)

You shouldn't set this variable but use the function of the same name
instead.

I don't have a strong opinion here.  One minor point is that if the
source specials method is used, then the PDF/DVI contains information
that's possibly not intended for those with whom you share the document.

>   (add-hook 'TeX-mode-hook '(lambda () (LaTeX-math-mode t))

You can use LaTeX without writing maths, so some people might prefer to
be able to insert ` quickly instead of having that as a prefix command.

> Also, dollar signs should automatically become electric if
> `electric-pair-mode' is active (I think currently one has set
> TeX-electric-math manually).

AUCTeX' and electric-pair's pairing features are basically exclusive.
You can use either one, but both together don't work too good.

> I was also going to add (setq TeX-master 'dwim) to the above list, but
> it didn't do what I meant (I am using ELPA's version, 11.87.3).  Was
> this setting supposed to discover if the current file requires a
> master, and try to find it?

Quite so.  If `TeX-master' is dwim, AUCTeX checks if there's some other
latex buffer that holds a file in the same directory and has
`TeX-master' explicitly set to a string/file.  This basically handles
the common situation where you have:

  main.tex       ;; TeX-master: t
  secs/sec01.tex ;; TeX-master: "../main.tex"

and now you do C-x C-f secs/sec02.tex to write another section in a
separate file.  In this case, sec02.tex automatically has the same
`TeX-master' value as sec01.tex.

Bye,
Tassilo