Re: Upcoming loss of usability of Emacs source files and Emacs.

[Artur Malabarba]

2015-06-17 12:20 GMT+01:00 Tassilo Horn <address@hidden>:
> Yuri Khan <address@hidden> writes:
>
>>> Indeed.  With such a change to isearch, Emacs takes one more step
>>> from being a sharp tool to being a blunt instrument.
>>>
>>> Don't forget that Emacs is used for things other than developing Elisp
>>> programs.  Such an identification of disparate characters is not going
>>> to be universally welcome, and will cause confusion.
>>
>> Emacs already has a facility for ignoring distinctions between
>> disparate characters.  It’s called case-insensitive search, and is
>> governed by a customizable global option and a toggleable local option
>> in isearch.
>
> So probably we should have some `quote-fold-search' with the same
> toggles.  Then modes need to specify somehow which replacements are
> valid, e.g., elisp-mode would define something like ((?` ?` ?‘) (?' ?'
> ?’)) meaning that ` matches itself and also an opening quote, and '
> matches itself and also a closing quote.

Folding characters based on something different than case has been
discussed here at least 3 times since I joined this party (and I'm
pretty new here).
It's been coming up since `info' started round quoting stuff (which
was well before the stuff being discussed here).

There is a bug report on it (I think it's from last year, but might be
sooner) where I offered a patch for that, but it was rejected because
it would only apply to isearch and people prefered a more general
thing (like case-folding).
Some time after that I started a thread that had 3 patches proposing 3
different ways to do that (though they weren't finalized). IIRC that
one only got the attention of Eli and Stefan, and the improvements
that were suggested there were beyond my coding time/skills.