latex-electric-env-pair-mode in AUCTeX

Question

the guys of the plain tex-mode have added a very nice feature with emacs 24.1, a minor mode called latex-electric-env-pair-mode which keeps existing \begin{...} [...] \end{...} pairs matched. I.e. when changing the environment name in the \begin{...} tag, its corresponding \end{...} is changed automatically (very nice when changing from starred to non-starred version of an environment and vice-versa).

However, when comparing with AUCTeX, the tex-mode still sucks... but I really like the new minor mode. I have tried to make a stand-alone minor mode by copying everything that looked like it was used from tex-mode.el to a new file and changed all the descriptors (so they won't conflict with AUCTeX or any remainders for tex-mode). Unfortunately this won't work, the minor mode can be turned on but it is broke: nothing is happening.

I'm not a (e)lisp programmer, that is to say I don't really understand the code. But maybe someone likes the feature of this minor mode and can port it to a stand-alone version? Also there might be some package out there which provides similar/equal functionality?

I'd appreciate any help!

Answer 1

You probably missed tex-env-mark (which sets marks that are used later by latex-electric-env-pair-mode to find environment starters/enders) or latex-syntax-propertize-rules (which runs tex-env-marks on relevant parts of the buffer) or the setting of syntax-propertize-function (which uses latex-syntax-propertize-rules so that these rules are actually used).

BTW, rather than copying those things, I recommend you try something like the untested code below:

(defconst my-latex-syntax-propertize-function
   (with-temp-buffer (latex-mode) syntax-propertize-function))

(add-hook 'LaTeX-mode-hook
          (lambda ()
            (set (make-local-variable 'syntax-propertize-function)
                 my-latex-syntax-propertize-function)
            (latex-electric-env-pair-mode 1)))