Subject: Re: bug#51040: No curved quotes in format-prompt and minibuffer-default-prompt-format

From: Stefan Kangas <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 5 Oct 2021 13:11:33 -0400

Lars Ingebrigtsen <[email-masked]> writes:

> Perhaps refactor out the curved quote stuff from
> `substitute-command-keys' into its own function and then use that?
> (Note: I haven't actually looked at that function.)

I've been thinking about doing that for a while and I keep going back
and forth.

First, it's a bit tricky to factor this stuff out from
`substitute-command-keys'.  I have a rewrite of that function in the
works (that I should probably finish up at some point), but even then it
is not exactly obvious that this would be super easy and obvious to
factor out in a good way.

So if we do this, I think we should just bite the bullet and duplicate
this functionality in a new function.  It should just be a simple
search+replace, so the duplication shouldn't be too bad.

In some cases, we don't have command substitutions, so it would be nicer
to be able to say `use-fancy-quotes' if that's what we want.  On the
other hand, besides the name there is also no immediate drawback to run
`substitute-command-keys'.

It is kind of nice to know that if we ever expand to have input with
command substitution, it will just work.  For example, what if a prompt
wants to say something like

    (format-prompt "You pressed \\[foo-bar], now input ...")

On the other hand, there are some places where we obviously will never
want to run a "full" `substitute-command-keys', for example I think we
have some places where we awkwardly say (substitute-command-keys "'").