message and electric-quote-mode

[George McNinch <gmcninch@gmail.com>]

I think I'm first going to post this to the gnus-list, though perhaps it
belongs instead on emacs-devel?

If I compose a message using message-mode, and do

M-x electric-quote-mode

(so that electric-quote-mode is *enabled*)

then typing e.g. `` in the "text of the message" does nothing.

This is not the behavior I expected after reading the doc-string of
electric-quote-mode (because presumably the text of a message should be
a "text paragraph").

However, typing > and then ` two times results in a curved double quote,
as follows:

 > “

The seems to be because message-mode sets the value of the variable

comment-start

to

"> ".

(See the function

  electric-quote-post-self-insert-function

)

Indeed, if I do

  M-: (setq comment-start nil)

then typing `` results in the behavior expected when electric-quote-mode is
enabled (whether or not there is a preceding "> ").

Presumably this is "not (quite) the desired behavior", though I'm not
sure precisely what should change.

I guess I should say:

emacs-version ==> 25.0.50.15
message mode bundled with gnus-version 5.13

All the best,
george

-- 
   =---=   George McNinch <gmcninch(at)gmail.com>                        
   =---=   http://gmcninch.math.tufts.edu