filldapt vs. modern Emacs

[Win Treese]

Proposal: remove filladapt.el from the Aquamacs distribution:

Why:

Back in the 90s Kyle Jones wrote filladapt.el for better and more flexible filling of paragraphs, especially in the programming modes. Among other things, it redefines the standard Emacs fill-paragraph function.

A long time ago, Aquamacs started including filladapt.el as the default (as far as I can tell, anyway). Which was fine then, because it was very useful.

But in 2007, the signature of the standard Emacs fill-paragraph changed from

(fill-paragraph arg)

to

(fill-paragraph &optional justify region)

So now if you call (fill-paragraph), it works in standard Emacs, but not in Aquamacs. And there are packages out there now using it that way.

Also, Emacs has also acquired a built-in Adaptive Fill mode. There’s some disagreement about which one is better, but that is now closer to a matter of taste than basic function.

Therefore, I propose that filladapt be removed from the Aquamacs distribution, or at least not load it by default.

In the meantime, here’s a little piece of function advice that works around the problem temporarily:

(defun wt/fix-filladapt-fill-paragraph (orig-fun &optional arg)
"Add argument to call to filladapt's fill-paragraph."
(apply orig-fun (list arg)))

(advice-add 'fill-paragraph :around #'wt/fix-filladapt-fill-paragraph)

Thanks,

Win

--
Win Treese
tre...@acm.org

[David Reitter]

Win,
This is a well-argued proposal. I agree that we should retire it in favor of adaptive-fill-mode.

Will you make the change and document it with a good entry in changelog.tex?

- David

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[David Reitter]

Win,
I wasn’t sure if you were going to do it, so I went ahead because I didn’t want to forget about it.
Please take a look and let me know if you think we need to do something to make old initialization files that people might have more compatible, i.e., define filladapt-mode as a no-op.

- David



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[Win Treese]

Hi, David. Sorry for the silence—I was sick for about a week and way behind on email.

Your changes look correct to me. I think it’s unlikely that many Aquamacs users have anything in their configurations that loads it directly, either with require or load-library. If they do, it’s been in their configuration for a while before coming to Aquamacs, and they’re likely to be able to figure it out.

Thanks,

Win