Hi Xah,

I'd be interested in your opinion of ELSE. I haven't tried some of the
others that you mention - ELSE suits me fine. I have tried tempo and
skeleton etc but were turned off by the "intrusive" and horribly awkward
interfaces that they presented to the user. I had been exposed to DEC's LSE
in the past (circa 1985), and found that it didn't "get in my face" or cause
awkward usage problems, so I decided to "port" their language sensitive
editor functionality to Emacs (hence E(macs)LSE :-)).

But facilities such as ELSE, tempo, skeleton etc are obviously not very
popular (which I have never been able to understand!) i.e. I have shown many
fellow programmers ELSE over the years and not a single one of them has ever
taken up it's use. In fact, through all the time ELSE has been available on
the Internet, I have only ever received less than 10 queries/expressions of
interest in it - which may argue that it just doesn't hit the mark! :-) But
given the alternatives that were available (especially in the "early days")
I don't think that was the case. Of course, these days, it is even less
likely because Emacs just isn't that popular as an editor i.e. there are
probably 30 - 40 programmers at my current place of employ and there is only
one other programmer here that uses Emacs - so the opportunities for
creating "converts" are not good at all!

ELSE does not use (e)lisp like syntax. It has it's own template file for
generating new templates. It has (what I believe is) extensive documentation
- something that has always annoyed me about many Emacs packages (such as
tempo and skeleton) - when they were first available it was very much "read
the code and examples" - I believe that has changed for skeleton but I had
long since lost interest by the time somebody rectified that!

So I would echo Drew's call - by all means do a comparison and share the
results if you can with us all.

Peter

On Wed, Dec 3, 2008 at 11:34 AM, Drew Adams <drew.adams@oracle.com> wrote:

> > there seems to be a lot elisp packages for defining templates. Has
> > anyone studied them and can give a comparison? Basically, i just need
> > a brief explanation of their syntax and feature.
> >
> > the emacswiki page
> > http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/CategoryTemplates
> > is very helpful in listing them but a clear summary and comparison is
> > lacking. here's what i found so far....
>
> Good idea. Please update the wiki with a summary of the info you found and
> whatever else comes out of this thread that might be helpful. The next
> person
> who looks where you did will then find that missing help. ;-)
>
>
>
>
>