yeet and yoink?

[gdanov]

while fooling around with latest updates I saw these new operations. Can't find them explained anywhere and keys look similar to slurp and barf?

[mickeynp]

They're like them, yes. But slurp/barf has limited utility in most languages due to the wildly different syntactic elements you're likely to work on. So it'll work (somewhat) with JSX and other minor things like that. It's definitely an underdeveloped feature, for sure.

[mickeynp]

Smartparens is a nice tool. It probably works there because someone meticulously hand-wrote lisp code to make it work for each language. Combobulate specifically does not make it possible to do this: it's a "it works everywhere or it works nowhere" type package.

The thing about making it work for simple cases is that I could probably do that, but the general issue is that moving "something to the left or right" of something else is very difficult to do properly because we operate on a tree and the human brain sees linear text! So slurping may easily end up gobbling up whole tracts of code you didn't intend to because of how it works; or it might end up slurping just a small amount and breaking because it reached a dead end in the tree.

But not impossible: it's still a goal of mine to support this properly!

[mickeynp]

For an example of what I mean try M-( to capture ahead with an envelope. It tries to cleverly snatch up and wrap in ( ) the code ahead of point, even from inside a node. You'll see it works great 80% of the time and the remaining 20% of the time it gets a little bit eager and grabs too much. Tricky, tricky, tricky problem to solve.

[pasunboneleve]

Oh, that's handy. Could you reference me to where in the docs you describe such actions? Or how you incorporate to your workflow? I get your point about correctness, but again, the code won't be correct until I finish typing what I'm typing, and sometimes I want to envelope with "" or {} or ``; or envelope backwards. paredit actions are standard (to me at least), and predictable, even if not correct in all circumstances. But how would I achieve this with combobulate?

[pasunboneleve]

I gave your README.md a ride and it really impressed me. I can see though your focus is way more on navigation and selection of blocks of code than on playing with pairs. So I guess the pragmatic approach would be to use both combobulate and smartparens?

On a personal note, thank you for Mastering Emacs. It brought me out of a decade of using Emacs and yet feeling stuck in configuration bankruptcy. You brought me out of it.

[mickeynp]

Workflow: the envelope system is a little bit underdocumented, as it's supposed to be my next big article on how combobulate's complex envelope system works (C-c o o e for a list of available envelopes per major mode) and you cannot easily write your own without some elisp shenanigans. I'm really busy with other things at the mo, which is affecting combobulate sadly.

The thing about correctness is you're of course right, which is why combobulate is not a strict structured editor: I do not like them and do not believe they are useful for serious work. However, I prefer tooling that at least works intuitively, and right now, the yeet and yoink stuff is non-trivial to build well and also make it intuitive. But it's my Next Big Thing to try and solve more of this stuff.

I mean you can still do this with M-h to pick your matches then simply punch { or whatever provided you have electric pair mode (or another autoclosing tool) to wrap the region. Not perfect, but it does work.

As for backwards specifically: ohh boy, backwards into nodes is another massive headache with syntax trees. Don't get me started :-)

You could have a look at js-ts's envelopes if you want to play around. I have one that expands = to ={...} or ="..." and you can cycle between them. Might help?

The general idea behind combobulate is to be a pragmatic tool for structured movement and editing built in such a way that it is language agnostic. If you write the procedures for your pet language, Combobulate will automatically work with it.

Glad you like the book! :)