Re: How to make Emacs popular again: Use monospaced fonts less

[Eli Zaretskii]

On October 11, 2020 9:35:39 AM GMT+03:00, Lars Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org> 
wrote:
> Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:
> 
> > We cannot just switch to variable-pitch font and leave the rest
> > unchanged.  Using a variable-pitch font will cause an annoying
> > horizontal movement of the mode-line stuff when some parts change.
> > For example, moving in the buffer will change the column and line
> > numbers, and everything to the right of that will as result shift
> > slightly in the horizontal direction.
> 
> The line numbers aren't that big a problem -- the number of digits
> rarely change, and all the numbers are the same size in most variable
> pitch fonts that are in use for this stuff.
> 
> I don't use column number mode, but I switched it on now, and that
> seems
> fine to me, too.

The number of digits in the line number can change a lot if you jump to another 
place with M-g g or C-x C-x or some other similar command.

And what about the "All/Top/Bot/NN%" part?

And then there are optional displays, like display-time-mode etc.

In any case, I wouldn't rely on what you see with some subset of fonts, this is 
a general feature we are talking about.

> > So to use variable pitch fonts here (and in any other tabjlar
> > display), we'd need to use 'align-to' display properties to keep the
> > other parts from moving.
> 
> After playing with this stuff for half an hour, the only thing that
> seemed vaguely disturbing was the U:** stuff at the start.  Adding an
> align-to after that would get us most of the way there, I think.

I rather think we should use align-to for all the fields.  Half-measures will 
come back to bite us down the road.