H, Drew
Hmmm... thanks for the clarification. That's going to be extremely helpful
once I'm back on track after the "grading season" ;-) All this started, at
least for me, when I was trying to write a simple interactive function to
copy the contents of the cell the point is in to the kill-ring (and
eventually to the clipboard). I eventually came up with a simple solution.
This make org-mode tables very comfortable for longer Web formularies with
complex data, like bank accounts.

Best, /PA

On Wed, 8 May 2024 at 20:14, Drew Adams <drew.adams@oracle.com> wrote:

> >> At the risk of veering off-topic (I mainly care about adding
> >> 'bounds-of-thing-at-point-provider-alist' and
> >> 'forward-thing-provider-alist'), would adding a new optional STRICT
> >> argument to 'thing-at-point' and friends be an ok resolution for
> >> everyone? This argument would enable Drew's proposed behavior. That way,
> >> users get all the nice behavior by default just like today, and
> >> programmers who require strict correctness in their code also have an
> >> option.
> >
> > 1+ if STRICT means thing starting at point
> > and without it we may need to look for the
> > beginning of the thing (lazy point setting)....
>
> Why "starting" at point?  STRICT shouldn't mean
> checking whether a THING starts at point.
>
> The "strict" behavior that's needed is checking
> _whether_ there is a THING at point, that is,
> checking whether the char at point (which really
> means just after point) is on/inside a THING.
>
> That's for `bounds-of-thing-at-point' etc.  For
> thing-at-point etc., IF there's a THING at point
> then that THING is the non-nil value returned.
>
> In terms of implementation, I suggest you take
> a look at the code in thingatpt+.el.  Look at
> functions `tap-bounds-of-thing-at-point' and
> `tap-thing-at-point'.  Just remove the `tap-'
> prefix for code that DTRT.  The file Commentary
> explains things in detail.
>
> My code adds an optional arg SYNTAX-TABLE, but
> you need not bother with that.  Elisp now has
> `with-syntax-table', which can be used as a
> workaround if there's no such argument.
>
> In the end, `bounds-of-thing-at-point' and
> `thing-at-point' should return nil if there's
> no THING at the char at point.
>
> For "lax" behavior that corresponds to the
> current vanilla behavior, if the strict
> behavior would return nil then they return
> what the strict behavior would return at
> (1- point).
>
> But really such a lax behavior is pretty lame.
> What's needed, for trying to grab a THING near
> point is not just checking backward one char
> but checking backward, forward, up, and down
> N chars, where N determines what "near" means.
>
> thingatpt+.el provides two user options,
> `tap-near-point-x-distance' and
> `tap-near-point-y-distance', the max number of
> chars from point to check for a THING (for X:
> left and right, for Y: up and down).  Setting
> the Y value to zero constrains search to the
> same line as point.
>


-- 
Fragen sind nicht da, um beantwortet zu werden,
Fragen sind da um gestellt zu werden
Georg Kreisler

Headaches with a Juju log:
unit-basic-16: 09:17:36 WARNING juju.worker.uniter.operation we should run
a leader-deposed hook here, but we can't yet