How to only import certain commands?

Question

The soul package defines a ton of short macros, some of which I use regularly for my own writing. I only need \hl and \sethlcolor. Is there a way to load the package and only get those two commands?

Answer 1

Some packages allow to select the amount of defined macros using options, but I don't think the soul package provides such.

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For very simple packages could be loaded in a group and only the wanted commands could be defined globally. However, this is getting complicated as soon this commands are using internal macros which of course also must be kept defined. The soul package is complex enough to make this a tedious task.

\begingroup
  \usepackage{<package>}
  \global\let\wantedmacro\wantedmacro
  \global\expandafter\let\csname special name\expandafter\endcsname\csname special name\endcsname
  % ...
\endgroup

Also some internal LaTeX macro which are defined for every loaded package must be handled, etc.

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A better way would be to either only (re-)define the macros after loading the package, as Alan Munn already stated, or save and restore the macros in question around the \usepackage. This is necessary if the macros would be defined by another package which must be loaded beforehand for some reason.

\let\origsomemacro\somemacro % save the macro 
\let\somemacro\relax         % reset it, so it can be defined using `\newcommand` can be used without error
\usepackage{somepackage}     % load package
\let\altsomemacro\somemacro  % save that macro definition under a different name if required
\let\somemacro\origsomemacro % restore original definition

However, this might cause problems if the package relies on its own definition of these macros.

Answer 2

You can load the soul package and then use \renewcommand to define your own macros.