Re: blank-mode.el

[Robert J. Chassell]

Today's GNU Emacs CVS snapshot, Fri, 2007 Nov 16  10:51 UTC
GNU Emacs 23.0.50.5 (i686-pc-linux-gnu, GTK+ Version 2.12.1) 
started with

    emacs -q -D \
        -l ~bob/emacs-21/blank-mode.el \
        --visit ~bob/emacs-21/blank-mode.el \
        --visit ~bob/emacs-21/blank-mode-README

The new blank-mode.el
    ;; Time-stamp: <2007/11/16 00:41:55 vinicius>
but still
    ;; Version: 7.1
is much better.  

I do not like dollar signs compared to ?\u21B5 but I prefer the color
which come with the glyph being less than #x0FFFF.  That turns out to
be dramatically important -- I did not realize how much.  (I could not
live with pilcrows at the ends of lines even if they had the right
color, but I can live with dollar signs.)

In the default set up, four options to `blank-toggle'

    (blank-toggle 'color)
    (blank-toggle 'mark)
    (blank-toggle 'blank-chars)
    (blank-toggle 'blank-style)

do not seem to do anything except invoke except invoke (blank-mode 1)
but not (blank-mode 0) when you already have (blank-mode 1).

The documentation should explain this.  

Also, the name might better be `blank-options-toggle' which is longer
but less likely to be confused with the other toggle commands, such as
`blank-mode'.

A comment in the source for `defcustom blank-display-mappings' should
explain why and when dollar sign was chosen.  You might say  

    ;; 2007 Nov 15:  ?\u21B5 is better than a dollar sign at 
    ;; ?\x24 or?$, but numerically it comes above #x0FFFF.
    ;; Until Emacs unicode merging, such a downwards arrow is 
    ;; displayed with the same face as surrounding text.

As I said, the library is getting better.

-- 
    Robert J. Chassell                          GnuPG Key ID: 004B4AC8
    address@hidden                         address@hidden
    http://www.rattlesnake.com                  http://www.teak.cc