If you have several projects sharing the same option set, you might want to setup a theme. Themes are named collections of project options.
Themes are stored in the patcher-themes user option. This option
is a list of themes. Each theme has the following form:
‘(NAME :OPTION VALUE ...)’.
NAME is the theme's name (a symbol). The remainder of the list is a sequence of zero or more option/value pairs, just like in project descriptors.
In order to use a theme in a given project, a :themes project
option is provided. It is a list of theme names (symbols). Use this
option in your project descriptor, and the project will implicitly
inherit all options from the corresponding theme.
One important note: as :themes is a project option, it can appear
in a theme. In other words, themes can inherit from other themes. When
Patcher tries to retrieve an option from a theme (an that option is not
directly available), the themes tree is traversed depth first.
Because themes can contain themes, a bogus setting might lead to an
infinite loop (a cycle in a theme graph). To prevent this, the
patcher-max-theme-depth user option is provided. It represents
the expected maximum theme nesting level and defaults to 8.
Patcher comes with a set of built-in themes for several revision control
systems. These are Git, Mercurial (Hg), Darcs, Subversion (Svn), CVS and
PRCS. Look at the value of patcher-built-in-themes to see what's
in them. Each of these themes have a -ws counterpart which
eliminates white-space differences in diff outputs. This comes in handy
if you are a committer (see Project Check In) and you perform some
kind of automatic white-space cleanup in the files you edit, especially
when you let Patcher generate the ChangeLog entries (see ChangeLogs Handling).
While you can't modify the value of patcher-built-in-themes,
you're free to do whatever you want in patcher-themes,
including creating a theme with the same name as a built-in one. This
new theme will take precedence over the other. Having this built-in
variable (a constant, actually) lets me modify its value from release
to release without risking to smash your own adjustments.