bug#53749: 29.0.50; [PATCH] Xref backend for TeX buffers

[David Fussner]

Hi Augusto,

On Fri, 25 Feb 2022 at 20:16, Augusto Stoffel <arstoffel@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi David,

>
> I took a superficial look at this thread, and this seems very nice.

Thanks!

>
> I was wondering why you want to be able to find the definition of macros
> with @ in their name.  Those are "private" macros that the user
> shouldn't have occasion to use.  Is it for a TeX programmer mode?

I confess that TeX developers are indeed one of the main targets for
the feature as I envisioned it.  For creating and following \labels,
\refs, and \cites (of all sorts) I find RefTeX very handy, as well as
for jumping around \chapters and \sections and the like.  What I miss
when developing are the code-navigation features of something like
xref, which are (from the user point of view) both simple and
powerful.  My modest goal was to make Emacs' extensive infrastructure
work a little better out of the box for TeX documents, especially for
styles and other collections of macros.

>
> Let me also mention a library I wrote for analyzing TeX code (accessible
> to Emacs via LSP):
>
>     https://github.com/astoff/digestif
>
> It's written in Lua (can run on the LuaTeX interpreter) and uses PEGs
> for flexible parsing.  If you want to be very ambitious about what you
> are able to parse, I think regexps are not sufficient.
>
> Digestif can handle \cite{messed up reference} just fine, for example.
>

This looks very nice indeed, and if I'm reading it right provides a
replacement both for RefTeX and for the code-navigation features I'm
trying to implement.  I figure I'll continue trying to get improved
out-of-the-box features into core, and if I manage to satisfy Dmitry
we'll then have a choice, but in any case I'm going to have a longer
look at digestif when I get some time.

Thanks for the hint!

David.