Subject: Re: bug#54551: show-paren-mode inconsistency

From: goncholden <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 24 Mar 2022 22:48:35 +0000

------- Original Message -------

On Friday, March 25th, 2022 at 8:28 AM, Eli Zaretskii <[email-masked]> wrote:

> > Date: Thu, 24 Mar 2022 20:13:55 +0000
> >
> > From: goncholden via "Bug reports for GNU Emacs,
> >
> > the Swiss army knife of text editors" [email-masked]
> >
> > I am using show-paren-mode to highlight watching opening or closing parentheses.
> >
> > Have seen that putting the cursor on the opening brace highlights the closing brace. But putting the cursor
> >
> > does not highlight the opening brace. One has to go to the character following the closing brace. Because
> >
> > elisp customarily has many consecutive closing braces, using the consecutive character to highlight the
> >
> > matching opening brace is counter productive.
>
> This is so typing the closing brace shows the matching opening brace.
>
> With your proposal, when I type the closing brace, the opening one
>
> will not be highlighted.
>
> So this is by design, and for a good reason.

Thank you for the explanation.

Consider the following command

(setq initial-frame-alist '((width . 72) (height . 26)) ).

Would be instructive that when one puts the cursor in the space between (width . 72) and (height . 26), the entire (width . 72) (height . 26) would be highlighted.

But (setq show-paren-when-point-inside-paren t) does not do that.
Can be very non-intuitive when debugging.  Also, if you put the cursor on the parenthesis following (height . 26), only (height . 26) gets highlighted, rather than the entire (height . 26) (height . 26).

Could some improvements be done about this?