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I use Emacs auto-capitalize-mode, which works perfectly most of the time except for ... (ellipsis), and words like e.g. and i.e..

If I write a sentence... and then another part... and then another part... auto-capitalize-mode mistakenly capitalizes it like so:

"If I write a sentence... And then another part... And then another part..."

How do I tell auto-capitalize-mode not to capitalize after ellipsis?

Same question for e.g. and i.e.

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    auto-capitalize-mode uses the Emacs default mechanism for determining the end of a sentence, which in turn relies on some regexps customizable in the paragraphs group; try M-x customize-group RET paragraphs RET and examine the values of the 'Sentence End.*' variables, in particular 'Sentence End Base'. I can't suggest a possible change to the value, but that'd be a likely place to start; if you need to change just the behavior of auto-capitalize-mode, rather than that of Emacs as a whole, you'd want to look at advising the function auto-capitalize-sentence-end. Jun 10, 2013 at 19:16
  • Is there a way to make typing e.g. or i.e. automatically call a function? A function which would insert those characters and then automatically lowercase the following word? Mar 15, 2014 at 21:48
  • Yup! Emacs abbrevs support hooks. The best way I know to define one is to M-x edit-abbrevs, which visits the abbrevs table list. Each abbrev is defined as NAME USECOUNT EXPANSION HOOK, where HOOK is empty by default; you'd define "i.e." as an abbrev which expands to itself, and whose hook finds the word following the abbrev and downcases it. Once you're done editing the abbrev table entry, C-c C-c will apply the change in your current session, and C-x C-s saves the file. Mar 27, 2014 at 4:20
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    In any case, so that my effort doesn't go entirely to waste, here's what I came up with for a hook function which downcases the word following the expansion: (lambda nil (save-excursion (forward-word) (push-mark) (backward-word) (downcase-region (point) (mark)))) Of course this only works on things Emacs recognizes as a "word", so a hyphenated compound, for example, would only have its first part downcased; if that's a concern, you probably want to replace this simple-minded effort with something that looks at whitespace and non-infix punctuation instead. Mar 27, 2014 at 4:35
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    Sure! What I added to the abbrev table was basically this: "e.g." 0 "e.g." (lambda nil (...)), with the placeholder filled by the lambda given in my previous comment. FYI, entering e.g. into a buffer, followed by C-x a i g (INVERSE-ADD-GLOBAL-ABBREV), tries to add an abbrev on g.; C-u 2 C-x a i g, which should add an abbrev on the two "words" preceding point, instead tries to add an abbrev on e.. I'm not sure why that doesn't work the way it seems like it should, but the misbehavior might offer some insight, which is why I mention it here. Hope this helps! Mar 31, 2014 at 2:20

1 Answer 1

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(setq auto-capitalize-predicate
  (lambda () (not (looking-back
       "\\([Ee]\\.g\\|[Ii]\\.e\\|\\.\\.\\)\\.[^.]*" (- (point) 20)))))

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