Re: arguments hint

[Stefan Monnier]

> Meanwhile, I decided to practice with Elisp for a bit and came up with the
> following patch for eldoc-mode.  I assigned copyright to FSF, so if you like
> the patch, you can include it in Emacs.

Since we are in feature freeze, I think this patch will have to wait.

> The patch makes eldoc-mode highlight the current argument with bold face.
> Thus one can immediatly see which argument he stopped his point on.  This is
> maybe not very useful when typing new code, but should be helpful when
> editing something.  I took care to handle special cases like `&optional' or
> `&rest'.

I like this idea (even though it is pretty hairy to correctly process
&optional, [OPTARG], or even &key and such which can appear with functions
defined with CL's defun*).
When editing calls to completing-read and other such functions with many
parameters, it's really handy (although I'd prefer to use CL-style &key
parameters for those).

> As another, minor, change it highlights function/variable name with
> appropriate face.  This should help distinguishing between function and
> variable hints.

That doesn't strike me as terribly useful (the text is pretty different in
the two cases already).

> I'm not very familiar with Elisp, so maybe you'd like to review the patch.
> I will appreciate any feedback :)

I didn't dissect it, but it looks pretty good.


        Stefan