On 30 Oct 2005, at 01:30, Miles Bader wrote:
The "opposition" such as it is, seems just as religious in its zeal.
Recently, we have arrived at a few good non-religious arguments.
On the "pro DTWW" side, there's speed, line-number referencing
(compiler errors e.g.), collaborative editing with others (who prefer
different line length, but need to read/edit my text), variable needs
in terms of frame width (when we use the most common form of system-
level UI, a multi-window desktop).
On the "no DTWW" side, RMS has made a very good point: GNU tools are
based on the assumption of relatively short lines. Display-time word
wrapping does away with single line-feeds as end-of-line markers, and
something like the output of "grep" isn't too useful any more.
I for my part, don't use grep or more on my LaTeX files very often.
But that'll be different for different people, and I respect that.
I hope that eventually, tools like grep, wc and more will move on,
recognizing that there isn't one standard 65 or 80 character wide
terminal any more...
As a _user_, I generally support display-time word-wrapping (call it
"DTWW"), because have to deal with editing such text too, and
traditionally it's been a pain to do that with Emacs (though
longlines-mode has done a great job with everything I've thrown at it
so far).
I see longlines as a good workaround. The bugs with variable width
fonts should be fixed and some essential things should be
reimplemented in C (sorry, can't do it, otherwise I'd prepare a patch
today).
As an Emacs hacker, though, my concern with DTWW is what interaction
it would have with the assumptions made by lisp code; supporters seem
to generally assume that the only modification required will be some
support in `line-move' to make C-n/C-p move by physical lines instead
of logical lines when DTWW is turned on in a buffer.
You'll never know until you've tried it out.
_______________________________________________
Emacs-pretest-bug mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/emacs-pretest-bug
