Suggestion - add additional characters to syntax table to support evil mode word motions

[davesann]

Expected behavior

in evil mode w motion should work on clojure symbols for example: this-symbol?!

Actual behavior

currently the motion will only include 'this' - i.e up to to the hyphen.

Steps to reproduce the problem

std doom-emacs with clojure mode

Environment & Version information

clojure-mode version

clojure-mode (version 5.16.0)

Emacs version

GNU emascs 27.1

Operating system

Linux 5.15.0-67-generic #74-Ubuntu SMP Wed Feb 22 14:14:39 UTC 2023 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

Suggested change

I am not too familiar with emacs lisp or the clojure mode so this is just a suggestion - it has worked for me in my local configs.

add the following extensions to the word syntax definitions in the clojure-mode-syntax-table (there may be a more compact way of expressing that but I am not familiar with required syntax).

you may or may not want to include the # character. I found it useful and it is accepted in symbols

I am not certain how/if to this should be changed where a character is not allowed as the first char of a word....

I note also that motions like yW are a problem because they pick up brackets when at the end of an expression. So I also included # / : and . because these are useful. There may be a better way to include these...

    ;; word syntax: add clojure symbol characters
    ;;  as per https://clojure.org/reference/reader
    (modify-syntax-entry ?* "w" table)
    (modify-syntax-entry ?+ "w" table)
    (modify-syntax-entry ?! "w" table)
    (modify-syntax-entry ?- "w" table)
    (modify-syntax-entry ?_ "w" table)
    (modify-syntax-entry ?' "w" table)
    (modify-syntax-entry ?? "w" table)
    (modify-syntax-entry ?< "w" table)
    (modify-syntax-entry ?> "w" table)

    ;; word-syntax: and other characters that 
    ;;  are useful in word motions
    (modify-syntax-entry ?# "w" table)
    (modify-syntax-entry ?/ "w" table)
    (modify-syntax-entry ?: "w" table)
    (modify-syntax-entry ?. "w" table)    

[yuhan0]

This proposal would introduce inconsistency with all other lisp modes and likely break things for various tools and non-evil users. The "w" and "_" syntax descriptors have specific meanings in Emacs, see https://emacs.stackexchange.com/questions/1075/whats-the-difference-between-words-and-symbols

The issue is that Vi's concept of word/WORD motions are not ergonomic to use with lisps; packages like evil-cleverparens / lispyville address this by defining new motions and remapping the w / b etc. bindings.
https://github.com/emacs-evil/evil-cleverparens#movement
https://github.com/noctuid/lispyville#atom-movement-key-theme (I use this personally)

Edit: it looks like evil-mode has a built-in solution too:
https://evil.readthedocs.io/en/latest/faq.html