Re: An XEmacs mode - here goes...

[Eric Marsden]

[...]

> It now has the following good and bad points:
> 
>  ++ Quite sophisticated font-lock (@B word and @B {two words} are correctly 
> highlighted in bold, for example).  Equations are coloured green so you can 
> see when your brackets match.
>  - Only really works in XEmacs and especially in the X Window System.
>  - There's still more to do, and the fonts need some tweaking
>  - @Title needs to be on the same line as @[[Sub]Sub]Section to be in the 
> right font (I think I know how to fix this)
> 
>  ++ Comprehensive syntax table, so XEmacs can correctly handle
>  "\"#" #comment
> 
>  ++ Electric quotes (from AUCTeX) - hard to describe. ("->``, ""->")
>  ++ Electric $ (original work) - Type a few and see.
> 
>  + Some keyboard shortcuts; more are easily added
> 
>  - No documentation yet
>  - Needs some Emacs knowledge to install and run at the moment
> 
>  * The next stage is to add the ability to run lout and jump to the error 
> messages
>  * AUCTeX does \command completion.  It should be easy to convert to complete 
> lout @Commands (I created a file of all such for the lout/include dir in five 
> minutes with 'sed')

This is amusing; I've been writing an lout-mode too, though for GNU
Emacs. It does font-lock, runs Lout in a compilation buffer (and
parses its slightly non-standard error messages), interacts with an
external Postscript previewer, and I got completion working on Tuesday
evening (if the word before the cursor starts with a '@' it tries to
complete it from a list of Lout keywords, otherwise it calls
ispell-complete-word). It also has a nice menubar for inserting Lout
constructs, handles the face-menu commands and is imenu-compatible.

Not everything works with XEmacs, because of stupid incompatibilities.
I'll work on it.


>  ** Long term, it would be nice to get AUCTeX's master/subfile commands all 
> working so you can press a few keys to just compile the region with the right 
> headers etc.

This would be nice, but probably more complicated even than for LaTeX.
The Lout headers are easy to identify, but then you would need to make
sure you get the @Section .. @End @Section etc constructions matching
correctly. It would be well nigh impossible with a non-standard Lout
format; I don't think my elisp skills are up to te task of parsing 
style sheets :-)


>  ** Special code for style sheets and reference databases would be nice
> 
> 
> Version 0.1 is about 100 kilobytes (there's still lots of deadweight lisp) so 
> I won't post it here and I don't have any public ftp space.  If anyone wants 
> me to post it to them directly or can offer ftp space I'll do so.

If you email it to me I will put it (together with mine for GNU Emacs
users) on my lout page at

        http://www.chez.com/emarsden/lout/


C-u 1000 M-x hail-emacs !

-- 
Eric Marsden
emarsden @ mail.dotcom.fr 
It's elephants all the way down.