Re: [tip/offtopic] A function to describe the characters of a word at point

[Juan Manuel Macías]

Hi, Marcin and Samuel, thanks for your comments,

Marcin Borkowski writes:

> You might want to extend it and create a minor mode which would display
> data about the current character in the echo area, Eldoc-style, or in
> a tooltip when you hover the mouse pointer over a character.  Depending
> on what exactly you need, these ideas might be more or less useful, of
> course.

I also have written a smaller function to display a quick information of
a single character at point, something much simpler and not as verbose
as describe-char. But it had never occurred to me to do something
eldoc-like with it. In my case, although for those contexts I prefer
quick information (describe-char also has its relaxing moment), I don't
feel such an urgency :-).

In any case, something quick and dirty, just as a proof of concept,
could be this:

(define-minor-mode char-info-at-point-mode
  "TODO"
  :init-value nil
  :lighter ("chinfo")
  (if char-info-at-point-mode
      (add-hook 'post-command-hook #'char-name-at-point nil t)    
    (remove-hook 'post-command-hook #'char-name-at-point 'local)))

(defun char-name-at-point ()
  (interactive)
  (let* ((char-name (get-char-code-property (char-after (point)) 'name))
         (code (format "#%x" (char-after (point))))
         (dec (get-char-code-property (char-after (point)) 'decomposition))
         (info (concat
                char-name
                " / "
                code
                " / descomp: "
                dec
                "\s"
                (mapconcat (lambda (cod)
                             (format "#%x" cod))
                           dec "\s+\s"))))
    (message info)))

Best regards,

Juan Manuel