[climacs-devel] climacs-based application

[Christophe Rhodes]

Robert Strandh <strandh at labri.fr> writes:

> Christophe Rhodes writes:
>  > (Relatedly...) I knew there was something else I wanted to ask, but I
>  > forgot about it.  I couldn't see if or how the display of the buffer
>  > contents in the textual-view (that is, in normal climacs operation)
>  > was to be extended -- for instance for fontifying syntactic markers.
>  > It would be nice if I could fontify syntactically incorrect or
>  > incomplete tabwords, for instance -- my parser is propagating that
>  > information to the syntax, in the form of distinct END and AFTER marks
>  > -- but I couldn't see any neat way of hooking into the display code.
>  > Am I simply the first to need this?  (I seem to recall in the mists of
>  > time there being a texinfo mode, but maybe that got zapped somewhere
>  > along the line?)
>
> I removed the Texinfo mode, because it was a bit too trivial.  The
> idea is that the display module will query the syntax module to know
> that there is an incorrect item at a particular place.  The display
> module will then use whatever method it wants to display such errors. 

Right.  So I guess this is another place where a protocol needs to be
developed?  The only generic function that looks reasonably
specializeable at the moment is DISPLAY-LINE, right?  However, that
deals with a bunch of functionality that I don't think I should have
to care about -- or at least not all in the same place: updating
output cache stuff, breaking the string up into words, and the like --
but also seems to make the display very line-oriented.

Here's a thought-experiment: what if I wanted a view which was just
like the current view, except that in text mode I want to display the
paragraph (which is a meaningful unit in the current text syntax)
containing point in a different colour.  I think currently there would
be no way of doing this short of reimplementing the whole display-line
thing, and possibly even more, whereas intuitively that ought to be a
very small operation...

I suppose what I'm asking is whether I'm right in thinking that this
isn't currently easy.

Cheers,

Christophe