Hi Paul, On 30/10/2025, Paul D. Nelson wrote:
> I've started taking a look and have several comments. Thank you for taking the time, really appreciate it as well as your earlier work on preview-auto. What's the best practice here about updating patches? Should I send an updated full patch or a new one on top of the current one? > I have several unrelated comments: Thanks for those, I agree with all of them and will make those changes. > It would be much more ergonomic if we could enable preview-point after > visiting a buffer. Is this a hard limitation? No, I can make this change. It would simply require modifying a couple of hooks. Should the logic be in a custom-setter code, or in a function/mode? Note that the setting has to be global (at least in the current implementation -- though I might be able to make it buffer-local if there's a real need for it). > The documentation does not indicate any intended value. Also, from what > I understand, this setting controls when new previews are generated, but > does not affect whether existing previews are automatically regenerated; > the docs don't seem to emphasize this distinction. This setting should be for both. Updating existing previews when the text is changed and for generating new ones whenever `preview-point-auto-p` returns non-nil on (point). For example, one can set it to `texmathp` to automatically generate previews for math expressions. I will see how I can update the documentation to better reflect this. > The command ends in "-mode" but does not come from a major/minor mode. > Perhaps instead something like "preview-point-toggle-display"? > > It might be cleaner to move the body of this command to a custom setter > for preview-point and then either delete the command altogether, or > rewrite it as a light wrapper around customize-set-variable. That way, > users can tweak preview-point via either the new C-c C-p C-t bind or > customize-set-variable. I'll see how that would look. Just to say, the purpose of this command is to provide an easy way to hide/show previews, for example if they are getting in the way of editing text. I wasn't thinking about it as a way to enable preview-point. I am open to suggestions of improvement to this interface. >> +(defun preview-point-toggle-auto-update (enable &optional silent) > > This reads like a minor mode. I would suggest introducing a small, > display-agnostic "preview-automatic-mode", bound to C-c C-p C-a, that, > when enabled, automatically regenerates existing previews, for both > preview-point and "traditional" preview. This aligns with an earlier > suggestion [1] to upstream automatic previewing. (It's simpler than > preview-auto, which also *finds* new regions to preview, but that > feature could be added later via a strategy variable or hook.) I'd be > happy to draft that refactor on top of your patch if the idea sounds > reasonable. > > [1] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/auctex-devel/2024-06/msg00031.html I agree a minor mode is better here and a patch would be appreciated (once I send the updated one with your suggested changes). I had actually wanted to ask you if the introduction of `preview-point-auto-p` could be a clean way to incorporate the logic of `preview-auto`, since I think one can have the clever code in preview-auto which detects if a preview should be generated as a customization of this variable. My thinking is to have automatic previewing split into two logical parts: The mechanism of updating previews which should be general enough, and the detection of when to do it which will be user-controlled. In any case, I think it would be good to have the infrastructure of automatic previewing which is being added here as suitable for the integration of preview-auto as possible (we might need to modify `preview-point-auto-p` so that it can return a region). >> + >> +;;; preview-point -- Auto-preview > > If we refactor as suggested above, then most of the functions below > should be given agnostic names ("preview-automatic-*"?), reflecting that > they are not specific to the preview-point feature. Agreed, though I haven't tested automatic previewing without preview-point. > --8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8--- > Automatic previewing code derived from preview-auto.el (Copyright 2024 > FSF, by Paul D. Nelson), adapted and integrated by Al-Haji Ali. > --8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8--- Will add this comment to the commit message. Best regards, -- Al _______________________________________________ bug-auctex mailing list [email protected] https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-auctex
