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

[Lars Ingebrigtsen]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> This reminds me, by the way...  I forget if this has been discussed
>> before or not, but in these cases it'd be handy to have a text property
>> like, say, (propertize "foo" :min-width 5) (or :min-width (50)), and
>> have the display engine compute how much space to add to the end.
>> 
>> Would that be much work to add?
>
> Let's put it this way: if there's a simple way of adding this, I
> cannot think of it.

Yeah, the semantics of text properties aren't very well-defined,
either.  I mean, if you have "foo" in the buffer with a :min-width (50)
text property, and then you insert a space in the middle (without any
properties), then both "fo" and "o" would have a separate :min-width
(50) stretch, so presumably would both be that wide.

So that's kinda a mess.

> Btw, if there were such a property, how would you calculate the value
> to put there?

It depends -- for instance, when calculating tabular layouts, I'd know
the number of pixels already.  In the mode line, I'd take 5x
typical-character-width if I wanted to display something that should
typically not take more than 5 characters.

Which is what we do in the mode line already for some of the things that
change lengths, like the line numbers.

OK, here's another random idea for padding variable-pitch elements in
the mode lines in particular:

        (setq mode-line-thing
              `(:propertize
                "some-string"
                :min-width 15))

which could have well-defined semantics, like "this element should have
the width of at least 15 typical characters", and be pretty easy to use?

-- 
(domestic pets only, the antidote for overdose, milk.)
   bloggy blog: http://lars.ingebrigtsen.no