Re: port x-symbol to GNU emacs 24.

[Tassilo Horn]

Uwe Brauer <address@hidden> writes:

>    > What features are those you don't see elsewhere in Emacs?  (I'm
>    > specifically asking about GNU Emacs, not XEmacs.)
>
> I think a picture says more than 1000 words, here is a screenshot. (I
> hope it will not be blocked).

Well, I guess you could use Emacs' built-in `prettify-symbols-mode' in
order to display TeX macros using some unicode characters (or
preview-latex of course).

>    > GNU Emacs doesn't have extents and specifiers.
>
> But what would provide a similar feature?  I hoped somebody on the
> list could tell me.

Emacs' overlays serve the same purpose as XEmacs' extents, and I think
there is or has been some 3rd-party package providing a unified API for
overlays and extents.

But I have no clue what specifiers are...

>    > My suggestion is to use the equivalent features provided by GNU
>    > Emacs.  If you tell which features you miss, people here could
>    > advise you about the replacements, either in core or in add-on
>    > packages.
>
> Ok, so I have to dig more into the code or hope that somebody in
> xemacs-beta could point me out what is the GNU emacs equivalent to
> those functions. I still wonder how x-symbol could have worked under
> GNU emacs 21, given that extents and specifiers did not exist neither
> for emacs 21.

I just downloaded x-symbol 4.5.1, and in its x-symbol-emacs.el there are
several aliases defined for things that error for you.  For example,
`map-extents' is made an alias for `cl-map-overlays'.  So you have to
load that first.

Well, eventually when loading x-symbol.el I also got an
wrong-number-of-arguments error but that's probably an incompatibility
which is easy to fix.

Bye,
Tassilo