Extending the concept of pretty-greek with icons/images

Extending the concept of pretty-greek with icons/images

[Nordlöw]

We humans are very good at recognizing content based on images and
shapes, often more efficiently than we recognize words, at least when
the words are long. For this reason a text written in chinese and/or
japanese can more efficiently ("with a higher bandwidth") explain a
concept to to the reader than is possible with (western) alphabets.

When reading source code, especially C code, we are often confronted
by quite long function names, especially in C environments such as
GNOME. These function names are however built up of smaller words or
acronyms often separated by underline or capitalization. After having
seen the clever Emacs extensions pretty-lamda and pretty-greek (given
below) I have gotten a feeling that this concept of "visual
abbreviations" could be applied also to these contexts of long C
identifiers. I believe this would make reading such C source code
easier and more visually attractive. Wanting to try out my idea I
thought I could start simple by overlay/change all the gtk_ prefix
with a miniturized version of the GTK's main icon seen www.gtk.org
(http://www.gtk.org/images/gtk-logo-rgb.gif). Is this possible to do
easily in Emacs or do I have to change the internals (C code) of
Emacs?

Thanks in advance for any reflections or/and help,
Nordlöw

Emacs Lisp Sources for pretty-greek follows. Just add to .emacs,
evaluate and restart emacs or do M-x emacs-lisp-mode to activate the
hook:

;; Pretty Greek
;; This is BenignoUria modification to Pretty Lambda. Substitutes all
;; greek letter names with its character. Very nice if you use greek
;; letters as parameters in parts of your code.
(defun pretty-greek ()
  (let ((greek '("alpha" "beta" "gamma" "delta" "epsilon" "zeta" "eta"
"theta" "iota" "kappa" "lambda" "mu" "nu" "xi" "omicron" "pi" "rho"
"sigma_final" "sigma" "tau" "upsilon" "phi" "chi" "psi" "omega")))
    (loop for word in greek
	  for code = 97 then (+ 1 code)
	  do (let ((greek-char (make-char 'greek-iso8859-7 code)))
	       (font-lock-add-keywords
		nil
		`((,(concatenate
		     'string "\\(^\\|[^a-zA-Z0-9]\\)\\(" word "\\)[a-zA-Z]")
		   (0 (progn
			(decompose-region (match-beginning 2) (match-end 2))
			nil)))))
	       (font-lock-add-keywords
		nil
		`((,(concatenate
		     'string "\\(^\\|[^a-zA-Z0-9]\\)\\(" word "\\)[^a-zA-Z]")
		   (0 (progn (compose-region (match-beginning 2) (match-end 2)
					     ,greek-char)
			     nil)))))))))
(add-hook 'lisp-mode-hook 'pretty-greek)
(add-hook 'emacs-lisp-mode-hook 'pretty-greek)
;; (add-hook 'c-mode-common-hook 'pretty-greek)

Re: Extending the concept of pretty-greek with icons/images

[Johan Bockgård]

Nordlöw <per.nordlow@gmail.com> writes:

> Wanting to try out my idea I thought I could start simple by
> overlay/change all the gtk_ prefix with a miniturized version of the
> GTK's main icon seen www.gtk.org
> (http://www.gtk.org/images/gtk-logo-rgb.gif). Is this possible to do
> easily in Emacs or do I have to change the internals (C code) of
> Emacs?

Something like

    (defun pretty-icons ()
      (add-to-list 'char-property-alias-alist '(display pretty))
      (add-to-list 'font-lock-extra-managed-props 'pretty)

      (font-lock-add-keywords
       nil
       `(("\\_<\\(foo\\)-"
          (1 '(face nil pretty ,(create-image "lock.xpm")))))))


http://i23.tinypic.com/2l93yuu.png

-- 
Johan Bockgård

Re: Extending the concept of pretty-greek with icons/images

[Nordlöw]

On 5 Okt, 15:39, bojohan+n...@dd.chalmers.se (Johan Bockgård) wrote:
> Nordlöw <per.nord...@gmail.com> writes:
> > Wanting to try out my idea I thought I could start simple by
> > overlay/change all the gtk_ prefix with a miniturized version of the
> > GTK's main icon seenwww.gtk.org
> > (http://www.gtk.org/images/gtk-logo-rgb.gif). Is this possible to do
> > easily in Emacs or do I have to change the internals (C code) of
> > Emacs?
>
> Something like
>
>     (defun pretty-icons ()
>       (add-to-list 'char-property-alias-alist '(display pretty))
>       (add-to-list 'font-lock-extra-managed-props 'pretty)
>
>       (font-lock-add-keywords
>        nil
>        `(("\\_<\\(foo\\)-"
>           (1 '(face nil pretty ,(create-image "lock.xpm")))))))
>
> http://i23.tinypic.com/2l93yuu.png
>
> --
> Johan Bockgård

Superb, I'll try it!

Thanks,
Nordlöw