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

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: João Távora <joaotavora@gmail.com>
> Cc: psainty@orcon.net.nz,  acm@muc.de,  eliz@gnu.org,  emacs-devel@gnu.org
> Date: Mon, 04 Oct 2021 16:44:26 +0100
>
> The system is behaving as designed.

Famous last words ;-)

Seriously, though: IME, this is not a popular response to user
requests.

> In the sequence C-h o s-foo, the last 5 characters typed are not the
> name of a symbol, they are the name of a shorthand (a shorthand is _not_
> a symbol) that you are seeing (in the sense of "with your eyes"") in
> some buffer.

If it is impossible, or hard, or inappropriate (in your opinion) to
support s-foo in this use case, would it be possible to have a special
command that would expand the shorthand in the minibuffer?  That is,
the user types "C-h o s-foo <SOME KEY SEQUENCE>" and that replaces
s-foo with the expansion, the "real" symbol.  Is that feasible?

> * So, if we follow our first instincts (they were my first instincts,
>   too!), it means that the exact same Help input in two different
>   situations could bring about different results.

That already happens in any number of situations, and shouldn't
prevent us from adding one more.  The most trivial example is
buffer-local variables; another example is mode-specific commands (a
recent addition in Emacs 28).  And there are many more: a user who
expects identical Emacs behaviors in different buffers will be
extremely disappointed.