Re: text-quoting-style

[Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de>]

Hello, Paul.

On Sun, Aug 30, 2015 at 11:29:27PM -0700, Paul Eggert wrote:
> Stefan Monnier wrote:
> > E.g. text-quoting-style doesn't prevent the existence of curly quotes in
> > Emacs, so for some interpretation of the above it's not sufficient.

> I think Alan was mainly annoyed by three things in the initial implementation of 
> curved quotes in docstrings.

> 1.  They didn't display well enough on his Linux kernel console to satisfy him.

> 2.  It's painful for him to search for strings containing curved quotes.

> 3.  When he copies from *Help* and/or *Message* buffers into other buffers, he 
> wants the copied text to be in grave style `like this' rather than in curve 
> style ‘like this’.


> Here's one possible alternative to ‘text-quoting-style’ to address these three 
> problems.

> (1) is fixed by using display tables to display curved quotes in grave style. 
> (This has already been implemented and no change should be needed here.)

No good.  Having different characters displayed from what's in the
buffer is a recipe for confusion, frustration, and anger.

> (2) is fixed by enabling character-fold-search.  This isn't the default yet, due 
> to a few problems with its implementation, but these should be fixable.

No it isn't.  character-fold-search violates the KISS principle,
certainly for me personally.  ASCII quotes and curly quotes are distinct
characters, and if I don't mind which one a search finds, I can put [`?]
into a regexp search.

> (3) could be fixed by transliterating quotes when they're yanked, if the user 
> sets a variable to do this transliteration.

I'm not sure how this could work.   Problem 3 doesn't concern me
personally, but it will definitely impact the generic user.

> This alternative would be superior to what we have now, because it would also 
> work for info files (which aren't handled by Emacs's current scheme).

What's wrong with `text-quoting-style'?  Why are you and Stefan so keen
to get rid of it?

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).