Re: visible-whitespace-mode

[Eli Zaretskii]

On 27 Nov 2001, Miles Bader wrote:

> Richard Stallman <address@hidden> writes:
> > There is already a feature show-trailing-whitespace
> > which does something similar.  I think it is better to extend that
> > that to make a completely different feature.
> 
> I think from a user's point of view, if they want to make all whitespace
> `visible', it doesn't make much sense to tell them "simply set
> show-trailing-whitespace to 'all"; the name of the variable
> `show-trailing-whitespace' is simply too specific.

I agree.

> The next question is, would it make sense to have visible-whitespace-mode
> be a wrapper that uses `show-trailing-whitespace' internally to do it's work?
> 
> I don't think it does.

But you could have visible-whitespace-mode which would control what kinds 
of whitespace are made visible.  If trailing whitespace is one of them, 
that mode could turn on show-trailing-whitespace to produce the desired 
effect.  For other types of whitespace, it could use the display tables.

In other words, I don't think users would mind if certain parts of this 
feature were implemented differently, provided that the UI brings them 
together.