Emacs: aLtCaPs version 1.2.0

2023-09-22

The altcaps package is a small, focused-in-scope tool that helps users communicate mockery or sarcasm effectively. It does this by alternating the letter casing of characters in the words it affects.

• Package name (GNU ELPA): altcaps
• Official manual: https://protesilaos.com/emacs/altcaps
• Change log: https://protesilaos.com/emacs/altcaps-changelog
• Git repo on SourceHut: https://git.sr.ht/~protesilaos/altcaps
  • Mirrors:
    • GitHub: https://github.com/protesilaos/altcaps
    • GitLab: https://gitlab.com/protesilaos/altcaps
• Mailing list: https://lists.sr.ht/~protesilaos/general-issues
• Backronyms: Alternating Letters Transform Casual Asides to Playful Statements. ALTCAPS Lets Trolls Convert Aphorisms to Proper Shitposts.

Below are the release notes.

---

Breaking change to the value of altcaps-force-character-casing

This user option enforces the specified letter casing for the given character. The value is an alist. In previous versions, the car of each cell was a character type, whereas now it is a string type. Concretely, the old value was expressed like this:

;; Old value
(setq altcaps-force-character-casing
      '((?i . downcase)
        (?l . upcase)))

It becomes:

;; New value
(setq altcaps-force-character-casing
      '(("i" . downcase)
        ("l" . upcase)))

At least based on my correspondence, strings are easier for users. The notation for characters causes confusion.

The public altcaps-transform function

This is the function that performs the alternating letter casing, while also respecting the user option altcaps-force-character-casing. The function is more efficient now. Use it in Lisp with a single string argument, like this:

(altcaps-transform "Your wish is my command")
;; => yOuR wIsH iS mY cOmMaNd

The above return value is consistent with the default settings. With altcaps-force-character-casing bound, we can affect the output thus:

(setq altcaps-force-character-casing
      '(("i" . downcase)
        ("m" . upcase)))

(altcaps-transform "Your wish is my command")
;; => yOuR wiSh iS My CoMMaNd

Characters without casing no longer matter

Before, the algorithm was toggling the letter casing of virtually every character. This means that a string like "a.c" was wrongly treated as a sequence of three characters with letter casing, so the program was trying to do this:

a => downcase
. => upcase
c => downcase

Whereas now, the transformation skips characters without letter casing:

a => downcase
. => i Am ThE iNtElLiGeNtSiA nOw
c => upcase

The altcaps-replace is superseded by altcaps-replace-region

The altcaps-replace was not sufficiently abstract, making the code a bit repetitive. The new altcaps-replace-region is efficient in that regard.

The arity of the two functions is different: altcaps-replace was accepting one required argument plus an optional one, while altcaps-replace-region takes three arguments at all times. Please consult its doc string before adapting it to your code.