How to customize the magit-todo display

Question

I use Emacs to write documentation, and a lot of times my files end up with some internal markup that looks like this: [TK: Where is the event handler defined?] in-line with the text. (“TK” is writer speak for “to come”, since the only common English words that have ‘tk’ in them are “pocketknife” and “hotkey”, and case sensitivity matters.)

I added “TK” to hl-todo-keyword-faces, but I discovered that hl-todo uses a regexp like (^|\s)(<keyword>), so the opening bracket confuses hl-todo, and it doesn’t show up in the todo lists.

I wrote a quick perl script to place a space before the bracket, and it worked, and now the magit-status buffer says my documentation folder has 59 TODOs over 41 markdown files – which is great! – but it won’t list them like it does in source code, which is not great.

So:

1. Remembering to write the space in [ TK: ...] is a pain in the neck, and looks terrible. Is there a way to modify the regexp such that the opening bracket is a legal character to hl-todo without hacking hl-todo’s source in the Elpa folder?

2. Has anyone seen this where Magit-todo won’t list the TODOs? What do I do? I’m not the world’s greatest Elisp hacker, and it’s always good to task first before trying to figure out for myself. Nevermind, this was just me not understanding the configuration.

Answer 1

The space issue is an inconsistency in the way magit-todos and hl-todos generate their regular expressions. I have submitted a pull request.