Re: Do shorthands break basic tooling (tags, grep, etc)? (was Re: Shorthands have landed on master)

[Joost Kremers]

On Fri, Oct 01 2021, Phil Sainty wrote:
> 1. A way of displaying long symbols in the desired short form,
>    such that the buffer contains the actual symbol, but the
>    user sees the short symbol (i.e. some kind of replacing
>    display).
[...]
> I see one negative: If lines lengths were based on the author's
> short symbols, then the actual lines may be longer than 80 cols
> even if the author sees them as <= 80. 

As Gregory points out, there is a package that does this already. It actually
has another issue, which is that indentation is sometimes wrong. If the second
argument of a function is on a separate line, it's indented to align with the
first argument. This position depends on the length of the prefix of the
function name:

```
(somelongprefix-do-something arg1
                             arg2)
```

The nameless package can align `arg2` so that it matches up with `arg1`, but
unlike the shortening of the prefix, that indentation is saved to the file.
Not dramatic, but it can occasionally be annoying.


-- 
Joost Kremers
Life has its moments