[Openmcl-devel] Smart quotes

[Ron Garret]

On Jul 14, 2009, at 7:43 PM, Gary Byers wrote:

>
>
> On Tue, 14 Jul 2009, Ron Garret wrote:
>
>> Since CCL is unicode-enabled, I would like to hack Hemlock so that I
>> can easily use directional quote characters like ?this? and ? 
>> this?.  I
>> have a customized DefaultKeyBinding.dict that binds these characters
>> to the (shift-)option-[ and (shift-)option-] key-events, which I know
>> work because I used them to compose the previous sentence.  But if I
>> do this:
>>
>> (bind-key "self insert" #k"meta-[")
>>
>> then option-[ gives me a square bracket, not a left-quote.  Looking
>> through the code I don't see any straightforward way to bind a key to
>> insert a character other than itself stripped of all modifiers.  I
>> suppose I could do what I want by defining a custom command for each
>> character, but that just seems horribly ugly.  Is there a better way
>> to do this?  There would seem to be a lot of applications for this
>> sort of thing in a unicode world, like maybe binding option-l to
>> insert a greek lambda.
>>
>> Thanks,
>> rg
>>
>
> The "Self Insert" command does something like (this is pseudocode  
> and from
> memory):
>
>  (let* ((key-event (get-last-key-event))
>         (char (get-character-from-key-event key-event))
>         (point (current-point-for-insertion)))
>    (insert-character point char))
>
> e.g., the whole idea is to insert the character associated with the  
> last key
> event.  (The real command takes a parameter - an optional repeat  
> count - and
> may call INSERT-CHARACTER more than once if that parameter is a  
> positive integer.)  That isn't what you want here, but it's similar.
>
> (defcommand "Insert Left Double Quote" (p)
>  "Insert a left double quote character at the current buffer's point,
>   deleting any selected range before doint the insertion."
>  "Secret doc string for developers"
>  (setq p (or p 1))
>  (let* ((point (current-point-for-insertion)))
>    (dotimes (i p)
>      (insert-character point #\u+201c))))
>
> (defcommand "Insert Right Double Quote" (p)
>  "Left As An Exercise"
>  "Guess, but a right double quote is #\u+201d ."
> )
>
> (bind-key "Insert Left Double Quote" #k"meta-{")
>


Thanks.  Not the elegant solution I was hoping for, but I guess that's  
what macros are for.

rg