The increased use of domain-specific languages (DSLs) and the absence of adequate tooling to take advantage of commonalities among DSLs has led to a situation where the same structure is duplicated in multiple DSLs. This observation has lead to the work described in this paper: an investigation of methods and tools for pattern specification and application and two extensions of a state of the art tool for patterns in DSLs, DSL-tao. The extensions make the patterns more understandable and they also make the tool suitable for more patterns. The first extension introduces a literal specification for patterns and the second extension introduces a merge function for the application of patterns. These two extensions