M-; does not respect comment-padding

[Nicholas Riley]

When I press M-; in nXHTML, it inserts <!---->. I have comment-padding set to " " or 1, which should insert <!-- -->.

[lborgman (lennart-borgman)]

Thanks for reporting this Nicholas, but I believe this is a bug in Emacs.

Can you test this in a fresh Emacs without nXhtml. Just start with

  emacs -Q

If the problem is there too then please report it as an Emacs bug. Tell me which it were so we can fix it here if I am wrong.

[Nicholas Riley (njriley)]

Comment-padding works for other modes. For example, if I run emacs -Q and evaluate:

(setq comment-padding "blah")

then press M-; below it, I get ";;blah". (I am using Emacs 23.2 but this worked fine on earlier versions too.)

If this is not what you mean, please let me know...

[lborgman (lennart-borgman)]

Ah, thanks, but a little misunderstanding. I meant you should use the same file as you did before, but without nXhtml.

However I should explain a bit more in detail.

It looked to me like you were editing a html file. You can edit those files in Emacs without nXhtml (which I guess you know). There are two main major modes in Emacs itself for it, html-mode and nxml-mode (the latter for xhtml only).

Can you please try (without nXhtml) these two modes with your file? You can switch major mode by doing something like

   M-x html-mode

[Nicholas Riley (njriley)]

Both nxml-mode and html-mode obey comment-padding, though slightly differently. nXML defaults to no spacing (like nXhtml); nXHTML seems to replace the first character of comment-padding with a space. So, for example:

(setq comment-padding "xy")

<!-- yy --> - html-mode

<!--xyxy--> - nxml-mode

It seems to be only nXhtml-mode that inserts <!----> regardless.

[Nicholas Riley (njriley)]

(and by nXHTML I mean html-mode. Sorry, too many acronyms...)

[lborgman (lennart-borgman)]

Thanks Nicholas,

Testing with the latest beta of nXhtml I think this works as it should.

I have sent a bug report for html-mode.