Re: Is is a major or minor mode?

[Tim Cross <tcross@nospam.une.edu.au>]

Galen Boyer <galenboyer@hotpop.com> writes:

> I'm actually having alot of success with defadvice.  I'm just advising
> the sql-interactive-mode and sql-mode on how to hook into my code and
> the java metadata and connection objects are getting spawned.  I'm still
> playing around in the new world of eieio though.  I'd like to subscribe
> to this package as well, but I keep just going back to straight defuns.
> eieio would probably pay off if this mode were to grow.
> 
I think advising functions is possibly my favorite emacs power
tool. If you ever feel like seeing some of the clever things you can
do with it, check out the emacspeak package. The initial reason I
moved to emacs was the result of losing my sight five years ago. I
wanted a powerful and effective text-to-speech system for working on a
linux box. The emacspeak package makes extensive use of defadvice to
provide very powerful and friendly text-to-speech interface. Unlike
other text-to-speech systems, because of the power of emacs, emacspeak
provides audible highlighting - similar to font-lock, you get
voice-lock, where different syntactic elements are spoken in different
voices. All of this speech support is achieved without the need to
modify any emacs source code/libraries etc. Instead, you just have the
emacspeak sources which are essentially collections of advised
functions with some additional housekeeping and interface code for
various text-to-speech systems.

Another package which might be worth checking out, but which I have
not tried out yet is the PL/SQL mode, which I believe just extends
sql.el - don't know how it does this, but it might be worth looking at
for some ideas of how you could extend/hook into sql.el.

Tim