Emacs: aLtCaPs version 1.2.0

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.

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The altcaps-replace is superseded by altcaps-replace-region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