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Q: how can I get abbrev tables to inherit properties?

Motivation: I'd like to mix and match abbrevs such that some expand automatically when typing, while others expand only when I explicitly tell them to via expand-abbrev. (See a previous question on this issue.)

Solution in a simple case: cribbing from the accepted answer on the above question, one can define a single abbrev to expand explicitly with:

(define-abbrev text-mode-abbrev-table "abbrev" "expansion value" nil
  :enable-function (lambda () (eq this-command 'expand-abbrev)))

Problem: I've got a whole bunch of abbrevs I'd like to use, so doing the above for each one would be tedious. It should be possible to use define-abbrev-table to automate everything, and then have the actual abbrev tables inherit from them. So, consider the following two tables:

(define-abbrev-table 'automatic-table
  '(("test1" "This should expand automatically")
    ;; ... more abbrevs here
    ("test2" "This should also expand automatically")))

(define-abbrev-table 'explicit-table
  '(("test3" "This should expand only after expand-abbrev")
    ;; ... more abbrevs here
    ("test4" "This should also expand only after expand-abbrev"))
  :enable-function (lambda () (eq this-command 'expand-abbrev)))

It seems like it should then be possible to do the following:

(define-abbrev-table 'text-mode-abbrev-table nil
  "Table's docstring"
  :parents (list explicit-table automatic-table))

It does not quite work out, however. text-mode-abbrev-table correctly inherits the abbrevs defined in automatic-table and explicit-table, but they always fire automatically when typing. In other words, the :enable-function property on explicit-table gets ignored.

How can I ensure that the :enable-function property gets inherited for the abbrevs in the relevant table without being applied to abbrevs in a different table?

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Dan
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  • Hmmm, as the implementor of those :parents and :enable-function thingies, I'd expect your code to work, so either there's some "subtle" detail that I'm missing or you're hitting a bug. I suggest you `M-x report-emacs-bug` with a concrete test case. – Stefan Feb 22 '15 at 00:08
  • @Dan could you figure it out? Otherwise you might want to delete this. – tarsius Mar 27 '15 at 01:44
  • works for me, with or without the doctring – Toothrot Apr 18 '20 at 20:51

1 Answers1

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Ha! There's a subtle bug in your code: the 3rd argument of define-abbrev-table is the docstring, so it treats :enable-function as the docstring and the subsequent function as a property name (with missing value).

Stefan
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  • I've just pushed a fix for that problem in Emacs's "master" branch. – Stefan Apr 02 '15 at 14:01
  • Thanks for the additional thought on this, although I'm still getting the same behavior even when I use a placeholder for the docstring (tested with `emacs -Q`). Any chance you could edit your answer to show the code that actually does work in case I've missed something? – Dan Apr 02 '15 at 14:14
  • I just added `"Docstring."` before `:enable-function` and tested it with `emacs24 -Q` and it worked (i.e. after enabling text-mode and abbrev-mode, `test1 SPC` expands while `test3 SPC` doesn't). – Stefan Apr 02 '15 at 14:38
  • I'm flabbergasted. I did exactly that and `test3 SPC` still expands. I cannot figure out what I've missed, so will keep trying. – Dan Apr 02 '15 at 15:06