SEEing LaTeX 17: A Bit More on Environments

To make the comments scripts a little more flexible, it turns out that we need to make some adjustments to how we handle the shell environment. The changes needed are minor, but, as we'll see, they lead to some new possibilities.

First, let's take a look at why the change is needed. I'd like to have more flexibility in how I call the comment.sh shell script. Significantly, I'd like to be able to call something else first, perhaps tr to change line endings to the newlines ("\n") that the shell requires. Alternatively, the shell script could be replaced with another tools for applying comments, much like how the typesetting scripts call pdflatex by default, but can be replaced by another tool like latexmk.

Doing that is quite straightforward. We just write a little shell script to handle the defaults, just like we did with other actions for the mode. It's just two lines:

#!/bin/sh -

COMMENT=${SEE_LATEX_COMMENT:-'"$SEE_MODE_RESOURCES/bin/comment.sh" %'}

eval $COMMENT

Notice that the default call needs to know the path to the resources directory for the mode, indicated here as the shell variable SEE_MODE_RESOURCES. Also, I've abandoned the original meaning of the SEE_LATEX_COMMENT variable; now, it defines the complete behavior for the comment command, not just the string to use.

Perhaps the simplest way to make the path available is just to define SEE_MODE_RESOURCES with the appropriate value. To do that, we rewrite the modeEnvironment handler to inject the appropriate value. I came up with this:

on modeEnvironment()
    tell application "SubEthaEdit" to set {modeName, modeResources} to {name, resource path} of the mode of the front document
    set envFilePath to (path to preferences from user domain as string) & "de.codingmonkeys.SubEthaEdit." & modeName & "_environment.plist"
    join of {"export SEE_MODE_RESOURCES=", quotedForm for modeResources, "; ", readEnvironment out of envFilePath} by ""
end modeEnvironment

I've also eliminated the parameter to the handler, which had specified the language mode for SubEthaEdit. The mode details were only used in defining the environment, so it seemed sensible.

With the new modeEnvironment handler, the logic for the CommentLines AppleScript becomes quite simple:

set env to modeEnvironment()
set pipeline to quotedForm for "$SEE_MODE_RESOURCES/bin/commentlines.sh"

completeSelectedLines()
set outText to shellTransform of selectionText() for env through pipeline without alteringLineEndings
setSelectionText to outText

There is now no direct interaction with SEE; the program is written, in effect, in a domain specific language for scripting SEE, abstracting away from the details of SEE's scripting implementation.

As a final point, I'd like to emphasize that the resource path for the mode is now available to the user. For example, I prefer to have a space after the percent sign for LaTeX comments. Thus, I just define SEE_LATEX_COMMENT to be '"$SEE_MODE_RESOURCES"/bin/comment.sh "% "' in the mode environment.