On 14/05/11 22:49, Linda W wrote:
Tony Mechelynck wrote:
On 19/04/11 09:36, Alexander Stepanov wrote:
Monospace fonts... That's very said. Thank you for explanation.
If you mean "very sad", this is due to the fixed size of the character
cell in gvim, something so fundamental to Vim's mode of operation that
it is not going to change.
---
Please don't continue to spread this misinformation. While the
current Vim may not support proportional fonts, it is already true that
Vim "fundamental mode of operation" has changed and supports displaying
characters that take more than 1 character cell. I.e. your information
is already outdated.
It's not outdated information, I was simplifying.
The size of Vim's character cell *is* fixed. The following uses are
possible:
- most characters use exactly 1 character cell each;
- CJK "wide" characters use exactly 2 character cells each;
- hard tabs use between 1 and 'tabstop' cells each, except if 'list' is
on _and_ there is no "tab:" part in 'listchars', in which case they are
regarded as ASCII control characters, see below;
- ASCII control characters (^@, ^A, ^B, etc.) use exactly 2 character
cells each; also upper-ASCII control characters if displayed with a
"tilde" or "bar" prefix instead of the circumflex used by "ordinary"
ASCII control characters;
- unprintable characters between 0x80 and 0xFF may use 4 cells each if
represented as <xx> (as when 'encoding' is UTF-8);
- unprintable Unicode characters higher in the BMP use exactly 6
character cells each (as <xxxx>)
- if there are any unprintable characters above the BMP, I think they
would use ten cells each, as <xxxxxxxx>
- the end-of-line character or character pair takes up no space on the
screen...
Changing any of the above would break compatibility with existing
scripts (and probably require huge rewriting in many parts of the C
code), something which Bram has always (wisely IMHO) refused to do
without reasons much more compelling than what you are advancing.
To say that Vim couldn't be further enhanced to accommodate proportional
characters, in a similar way, could easily be seen as
saying "Bram" isn' intelligent enough to figure out how to enhance vim
in this way. Since Vim already support character sets with multi-width
characters, I see no reason why that method couldn't be extended to support
proportional characters.
I'm not saying Bram is not intelligent enough, I'm saying the notion of
columns would go out the window, either breaking compatibility (if you
keep columns vertical) or breaking present nice looks of e.g.
'cursorcolumn' or of block-visual being a rectangle (if you keep the
existing meaning of what a column is in terms of characters). In fact
what I'm saying is thas Bram is wise enough... not to let himself be
swayed by the kind of arguments you are using. Sorry if I sound
insulting, it is not my intention.
I.e -- instead of the current editor's support for 1 or 2-width chars,
one could use 1-10 width chars, with an 'i' taking 1 width, and an 'M'
taking 4-5, and asian chars taking 8-10.
Please stop claiming vim could never support multi-width
character sets, as it already does support bi-width character sets.
It's not as simple. Double-width characters could not be displayed at
all before it was decided to use 2 columns for them, so no compatibility
was broken. Now you would want to break compatibility with something
which works well, and for the dubious profit of making proportional
fonts look better.
-l
Regards,
Tony.
--
Here is the fact of the week, maybe even the fact of the
month. According to probably reliable sources, the Coca-Cola people
are experiencing severe marketing anxiety in China.
The words "Coca-Cola" translate into Chinese as either
(depending on the inflection) "wax-fattened mare" or "bite the wax
tadpole".
Bite the wax tadpole.
There is a sort of rough justice, is there not?
The trouble with this fact, as lovely as it is, is that it's
hard to get a whole column out of it. I'd like to teach the world to
bite a wax tadpole. Coke -- it's the real wax-fattened mare. Not bad,
but broad satiric vistas do not open up.
-- John Carrol, San Francisco Chronicle
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