SEEing LaTeX 16: Comments Continued

In installment 15 of this series, I discussed difficulties that I'd encountered while exploring adding comments to the SubEthaEdit LaTeX mode. In so doing, I presented a shell script and several AppleScript handlers to address the difficulties. With that infrastructure, it is not so hard to incorporate comments into the mode.

First, there is an additional, minor change. Earlier, I'd described a prependEnvironment AppleScript handler. This proves to be too specific. A slightly simpler modeEnvironment handler seems to be a better fit. It is defined as:

on modeEnvironment for seeMode
    set envFilePath to (path to preferences from user domain as string) & "de.codingmonkeys.SubEthaEdit." & (name of seeMode) & "_environment.plist"
    readEnvironment out of envFilePath
end modeEnvironment

Hopefully, that is straightforward enough.

With the infrastructure set up, the logic for the AppleScript becomes pretty straightforward. We first get some needed information from the SEE document. We use that information to read out the environment using modeEnvironment and to build a pipeline string calling our comment.sh shell script. Then, we adjust the text selection to select complete lines, transform that text by running it through pipeline, and set the selection to the transformed text. Additionally, we define seescriptsettings to integrate our AppleScript into SEE. The settings are patterned after those of the Objective C mode. Here is the relevant fragment of the AppleScript:

tell application "SubEthaEdit"
        set activeMode to mode of front document
        set modeResources to resource path of activeMode
end tell

set env to modeEnvironment for activeMode

completeSelectedLines()
set inText to selectionText()
set pipeline to join of {quotedForm for (modeResources & "/bin/comment.sh"), quotedForm for "${SEE_LATEX_COMMENT:-%}"} by space  

set outText to shellTransform of inText for env through pipeline without alteringLineEndings
setSelectionText to outText

-- SubEthaEdit settings

on seescriptsettings()
    {displayName:"Un/Comment Selected Lines", keyboardShortcut:"@/", inContextMenu:"yes"}
end seescriptsettings

Note that the comment string can be set with the SEE_LATEX_COMMENT environment variable, defaulting to a "%".

The result is fairly nice, but not without shortcomings. There is a brief, but noticable, hesitation between activating the script and seeing the results. It's reasonably clear that building up the environment string is the problem; I'm not sure whether it's worth fixing or not. More significantly, there is a subtle logic problem. Implicitly, I've assumed that the LaTeX document is using Unix-style ("\n") line endings. That's a pretty safe assumption, most of the time, but can be wrong; we'll fix that next time.