Protesilaos Stavrou

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Change Log of aLtCaPs

Apply alternating letter casing to convey sarcasm or mockery

This document contains the release notes for each tagged commit on the project's main git repository: https://git.sr.ht/~protesilaos/altcaps.

The newest release is at the top. For further details, please consult the manual: https://protesilaos.com/emacs/altcaps.

1.2.0 on 2023-09-22

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The altcaps-replace is superseded by altcaps-replace-region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

1.1.0 on 2022-11-28

New user option

Introduced the user option altcaps-force-character-casing. It forces the given letter casing for specified characters. Its value is an alist of (CHARACTER . CASE) pairs. CHARACTER is a single character (satisfies the characterp condition), while CASE is the upcase or downcase symbol (code sample further below).

The idea is to always render certain characters in lower or upper case, in consideration of their legibility in context. For example, the default altcaps algorithm produces this: 

iLlIcIt IlLiBeRaL sIlLiNeSs

Whereas if the value of this variable declares i to always be lowercase and L uppercase, then we get this: 

iLLiCiT iLLiBeRaL siLLiNeSs

The code to do this: 

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

Thanks to Cédric Barreteau for the idea of forcing a given letter case on specified characters. I think that giving users the option keeps our code simple, while providing a useful point of customisation.

Cédric is the author of the nvim-altcaps, which is a plugin for NeoVim based on my altcaps idea: https://github.com/cbarrete/nvim-altcaps.

Improvements to documentation

  • Wrote a README.md which contains basic information about the project, including links to the official Git repos, its mirrors on GitHub/GitLab, as well as the project's mailing list. This file is useful for Git forges that have trouble parsing an Org file (the manual is README.org, which the GNU ELPA machinery converts into a proper Info manual).
  • Added missing index entries to the manual for our commands and the new user option.
  • Wrote this very CHANGELOG.org, which is helpful for those who inspect the Git repository.