Re: Last call for lua-mode contributors

[Ken Raeburn <raeburn@raeburn.org>]

On Jan 17, 2012, at 23:32, Miles Bader wrote:
> immerrr again <immerrr+lua@gmail.com> writes:
>> As some of you might know, lua-mode, Emacs major mode for editing Lua, is
>> undergoing integration to Emacs mainline.
> 
> Hopefully lua-mode's bogus handling of symbols vs. words will finally
> be fixed as a result.....
> 
> [lua-mode redefines "_" as a word-component; it shouldn't, as it
> really messes with users' instincts, and makes Emacs commands less
> useful.  Historically this was often done by language-modes as an
> simple (though misguided) expedient to allow them to safely use "\<"
> and \>" in regexps matching keywords, but nowadays they shouldn't do
> that, they should leave "_" alone and use "\_<" and "\_>" instead.]

My "instincts" have long been to interpret "word" as "identifier or keyword" in programming modes, to the point of customizing the syntax tables at startup to make "_" a word component.  Not for regular expressions, but for word-motion commands; I like the fact that I can skip over one identifier with M-f no matter how many underscores it contains -- string_to_widget, stringToWidget, string2widget, and stringtowidget are all treated the same.  It's also more useful in constructing keyboard macros that kill-word identifiers and later yank them from the kill ring; typing in a regexp search would be much more annoying.

I haven't made the customization yet at my new (well, ~2 years) job -- but that's because our coding standards use camelCaseAndNoUnderscores so the word-motion commands already work on identifiers and not on (English) words.  (Though I've been dealing with Linux code lately, so it may be time to make the change.)  If I often wanted to deal with the individual English words making up an identifier, the handling of underscore wouldn't be enough to make Emacs work correctly.

I realize I'm much closer to the power-user end of the spectrum than most typical users, but among those heavily using programming modes, is this such a strange mind-set?

(I have no particular opinion on lua-mode specifically.)

Ken