Frowny.el

For alphapapa, so he can insert frownies with electric-pair-mode.

This package ships `frowny-mode’, which enables inserting a single “(” when after a “:” – meaning it’ll insert :( without closing the parentheses for modes like electric-pair-mode, paredit-mode, and others.

Version 0.3

2021-11-07: Add frowny-inhibit-modes, so I can toggle hide-details-mode in dired.

Version 0.2

Version 0.2, now with smileys! Yes, if you’re one of those happy-go-lucky people who just has to smile all the time, frowny.el is now for you as well. Go nuts, ya filthy animal.

Installation

I use straight.el, which looks like this:

(straight-use-package '(frowny
                        :host github
                        :repo "duckwork/frowny.el"))

You might need a different form.

Use

Simple as adding it to whatever modes you don’t want to always insert electric pairs, e.g.

(add-hook 'erc-mode-hook #'frowny-mode)

Or you can enable global-frowny-mode, which enables frowny in every buffer. If you want to enable global-frowny-mode but only for some modes, customize frowny-modes.

Customization

There are a (growing?) number of customization options available for frowny-mode:

frowny-eyes

the regex to look for when seeing if ( is completing a frowny. Default: \\(?::-\\|[:=]\\), which captures frownies like :(, :-(, and ==(. I'd recommend replacing it with an =rx form, like this:

(setq frowny-eyes (rx (or ":" ":-" "=" ":'-")))
    

frowny-eyes-looking-back-limit

frowny uses looking-back to determine whether the ( you type is part of a frowny. Emacs’s manual recommends limiting the number of characters looking-back searches for performance reasons, so I recommend setting this number to the maximum length of the strings you have as options in frowny-eyes. As such, the default is 2.

frowny-modes

When enabling global-frowny-mode, you might not want frowny to apply to every buffer. Add modes to this list to only apply frowny to them. By default, frowny applies to every mode.

frowny-inhibit-modes

A list of modes in which to inhibit frowny mode. By default, only special-mode is inhibited. I also add dired-mode in my configuration.

Of course, you can always customize these options using Emacs’s Customize functionality.

Still to do

• I should probably make frowny-modes more … complex, and allow specifying modes not to apply frowny to.
• I could do a frowny-prog-mode that checks whether the point is in a comment or not, and frowny accordingly.