bug#34476: fluffy whitespace in the mode-line, despite it running off the screen

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Lars Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org>
> Cc: contovob@tcd.ie,  34476@debbugs.gnu.org
> Date: Sat, 15 Aug 2020 12:55:33 +0200
> 
> > If this is not acceptable, then we will have to go back to your
> > original proposal of using Fformat_mode_line
> 
> Yeah, I think that may be the way to go.
> 
> > (although I'm still unhappy with doing that, as we had over the years
> > quite a few complaints that the result is not exactly identical to the
> > displayed mode line).
> 
> Perhaps that's something that can be fixed?

Not easily, because the display engine uses a different environment,
and also temporarily changes various settings as needed, something you
cannot do in Lisp.

> > If the patch below is deemed "good enough", we will probably need to
> > implement something similar for Fformat_mode_line, because users might
> > expect the latter to produce a similarly squeezed whitespace.
> 
> Yup.  Perhaps the squeezing should just be moved into that function?

See above.