Me too vim8 idea: named marks, overlays à la emacs

[Thomas]

Hi,

As I recently (today) saw a few postings with vim8 suggestions, I would 
like to propose emacs like overlays (in xemacs they are called 
differently and IIRC are probably implemented more cleanly but I forgot 
the name).

An overlay covers some text area and may contain information (overlay 
specific properties/variables), area-specific keymaps and popup menus 
(which are only effective within this overlay). Optionally overlays can 
be saved like vim marks when saving a file (although this should 
probably be left to plugin writers).

This would provide for whole new set of features that are simply not 
possible now to implement in vim, eg non-intrusive annotations to text 
or source code (useful for collaborative development and code revision). 
It would also make it possible to save syntax related information 
in/with the document so that one wouldn't have to rebuild/recollect all 
the data when loading the document again which could improve 
performance. I'd also consider overlay-specific keymaps a big 
improvement as it help to avoid conflicts between plugins and would IMHO 
help plugin writers.

This really is the only feature I miss since switching from xemacs to 
vim. And well, in case I wasn't able to convey the benefits of overlays 
to people who never used emacs (and did some elisp hacking): Let's just 
say they're really cool.

Regards,
Thomas.