GNU bug report logs - #31204
25.3; Make word motion more customizable

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Message #5 received at submit <at> debbugs.gnu.org (full text, mbox):

From: Yuri Khan <yuri.v.khan <at> gmail.com>
To: bug-gnu-emacs <at> gnu.org
Subject: 25.3; Make word motion more customizable
Date: Wed, 18 Apr 2018 15:55:16 +0700

While trying to make word motion commands (Ctrl+left/right, M-f/b) more
similar to that implemented in other editors:

http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/help-gnu-emacs/2018-04/msg00230.html

I encountered a difficulty.

The function ‘forward-word’ behaves as follows:

1. Skip to the nearest character having word constituent syntax.
2. Skip to the nearest word boundary.

Step 2, by default, finds:

* a non-word-constituent character, OR
* a transition between two adjacent characters of different scripts
  (subject to exceptions controlled by ‘word-combining-categories’ and
  ‘word-separating-categories’),

whichever comes first.

Step 2 can also be customized by modifying
‘find-word-boundary-function-table’. This enables various useful
behaviors such as ‘subword-mode’, ‘superword-mode’, and possibly CJK
word breaking rules.

Step 1, on the other hand, is not customizable at all.


The specific behavior that I was trying to implement was to find the
nearest transition:

* from a word character to a non-word character, OR
* from a non-word non-whitespace character to a word character, OR
* from a non-word non-whitespace character to a whitespace character.

As an illustration (where ‘|’ specifies word motion stops when going
left to right):

    foo| ***| +++| (|bar|)|
       ^

When cursor is after ‘foo’, step 1 of ‘forward-word’ skips to directly
before ‘bar’, missing two stops.

As a result, implementing the desired behavior requires either:

* defining separate functions ‘my-forward-word’, ‘my-backward-word’,
  ‘my-left-word’, ‘my-right-word’, ‘my-kill-word’,
  ‘my-backward-kill-word’, and possibly more, and remapping their key
  bindings; OR

* advising ‘forward-word’ with an :override.


Perhaps it would be nice to have an optional hook for step 1 of
‘forward-word’, a function that would take two arguments POS and LIMIT,
and returning the starting word boundary position from which step 2 would
then work.


In GNU Emacs 25.3.2 (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu, GTK+ Version 3.18.9)
 of 2017-09-13 built on lcy01-32
Windowing system distributor 'The X.Org Foundation', version 11.0.11905000
System Description:    Ubuntu 16.04.4 LTS

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