Re: [AUCTeX-devel] Support for expl3

[Sean Allred]

Thanks for everything so far, guys. Simply being able to correctly jump around 
by token is a great help :)

Building off of what was provided here, I’ve taken the liberty of adding some 
font-locking with the help of the awesome folks over at Emacs.SE. I’ve attached 
an ‘updated’ expl3.el to this email (I can’t get git-diff to cooperate, for 
some reason). I abstracted the anonymous hook-function into a named function 
(that’s still added as a hook). In this function, I’ve added font-locking for 
regular expression variables I set just above it.

I would welcome any feedback / suggestions as I hope to have this included in 
the official distribution.

However, I worry that a simple style file might not be enough for no-joking 
expl3 editing support: In addition to a different highlighting scheme, there is 
at least one input difference that causes concern. The way to input a literal 
space in expl3 is to use `~` – in the past, I’ve used my own poor-man’s minor 
mode to control whether SPC inserts a space or a tilde. (When writing error 
messages, you like to include as many helpful words as you can – all of these 
words are separated by these literal spaces (~).) Gets a little tedious with 
the shift key and all (on US-English keyboards).

There may very well be those actually on the project who disagree with me (and 
I’ve raised the question in the TeX StackExchange chatroom [1]), but I think it 
may be appropriate to add expl3 as a separate TeX dialect. In an ideal world, 
no expl3 code will appear in LaTeX documents – it should be gathered together 
in its own file. Would a patch to remove the style file and use dialects be 
welcome? (I haven’t ever messed with different dialects in AUCTeX, but I’m 
willing to learn.)

Best,
Sean

[1]: http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/20891531#20891531

expl3.el
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