“Smart” Quotes in Emacs

smart-quotes.el smartly enables automatic insertion of correctly curled single or double quotation marks in emacs.

This is typographically nice, but can be deadly in Unicode-enabled programming languages where a
"string starting with a dumb-quote, but terminated by a smart one”
is unterminated for the parser but looks terminated for the human reader. And pressing C-v at front/end of every string gets exhausting.

Disabling smart quotes for certain modes is easy:

 (defun my/smquoteoff () (smart-quote-mode 0))
 (add-hook 'emacs-lisp-mode 'my/smquoteoff)
 (add-hook 'python-mode 'my/smquoteoff)

But what about literate programming, as for example in org-babel codeblocks? The buffer is in org-mode, definitely not a programming mode, but the blocks inside #+begin/end_src are:

* About strings
[...] Some “smart” statement about /strings/
#+begin_src 
  s = "dumbly quoted string";
  ...
#+end_src

org-mode has a predicate to check if point is inside such a code block, named org-in-src-block-p, but how to use it without rewriting smart-quotes.el?

Emacs' lisp advice-add to the rescue! This is Aspect-oriented programming, where a function g is wrapped in another function f. It has a :before-until “combinator”, which evals g only if f returns nil when run with g's parameters.

In this case:

(defun _my/verb-double-quote (&rest r)
	(if (org-in-src-block-p) (progn (insert-char #x22) t) nil))
(advice-add 'smart-quotes-insert-double :before-until
	   #'_my/verb-double-quote)

smart-quotes-insert-double now depends on org-in-src-block-p being false, otherwise ASCII char 0x22, i.e ", is inserted.

Single quotes are left as an ‘exercise for the reader’.

Mon, 18 Mar 2024
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From William Gaddis' J R

Since you're not here to learn anything,
but to be taught
so you can pass these tests,
knowledge has to be organized
so it can be taught,
and it has to be reduced to information
so it can be organized.
Do you follow that?

In other words
this leads you to assume that organization
is an inherent property of the knowledge itself,
and that disorder and chaos
are simply irrelevant forces
that threaten it from outside.

In fact it's exactly the opposite.
Order is simply a thin, perilous condition
we try to impose on the basic reality of chaos.

William Gaddis, J R

Wed, 16 Jan 2019
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