xterm-quotes

Style `this' to look like ‘this’.
Alhadis
1.0.1 18
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XTerm-style quote hack

You've probably seen text quoted `like this' before:

Figure 1: Backtick/apostrophe quotes

Unless you were hacking in the 80s, chances are this notation looks foreign and hackish to you. The origin of this quote-style is kinda complicated, but basically pre-Unicode terminals had screen fonts with backtick/apostrophe glyphs that looked like this:

Figure 2: Sun Gallant Demi (Solaris 11.3)

Whoa! Much nicer, eh? Sad you don't see it once you fire up your window manager...

Unless you install this.

This package employs a sly hack to style `this' to look like ‘this’ (using U+2018/U+2019, proper directional quotes). The effect is purely cosmetic; i.e., the underlying file data isn't changed, only its appearance:

Figure 3: CSS rules!

The package is careful not to target source code, and it only applies the effect within comments, readmes, and docstrings (and only if the backtick/apostrophe style is used).

Temporarily disabling the quote-hack

Understandably, it might get confusing not knowing which is a directional quote and what's secretly a backtick/apostrophe pair. The package includes an editor command to toggle the effect on-and-off, although it isn't bound to a keybinding by default. You can add one yourself, if toggling faux-quotes is important to you:

# In `~/.atom/keymap.cson': 
body:
	"ctrl-y": "xterm-quotes:toggle"