bug#8130: 23.2; transient-rectangle-mode

bug#8130: 23.2; transient-rectangle-mode

[Andrea Crotti]

I would like to propose transient-rectangle-mode.  Working with
rectangles sometimes is a bit hard to understand what exactly the
boundaries of the rectangle are.

My idea was to give a slightly different face to the part of the
buffer which is highlighted by transient-mode and also in the current
rectangle.

There are other modes for rectangle selection (cua-selection-mode for
example) but they involve using a different key combination, while
with transient-rectangle-mode I would like to use the same selection
mechanism.

Thanks,
Andrea Crotti

bug#8130: 23.2; transient-rectangle-mode

[Stefan Monnier]

> I would like to propose transient-rectangle-mode.  Working with
> rectangles sometimes is a bit hard to understand what exactly the
> boundaries of the rectangle are.

Yes, that would be good.  I think the best way to go about doing it is
to move the highlighting of the region to Elisp code.
One element to doing it would be to add a pre-redisplay-hook of some
sort which could update a "region overlay" (move its beg and end to
region-beginning and region-end), at which point it should be reasonably
easy to make the region appear any other way (e.g. as a rectangle or
a combination of the two as you suggest).


        Stefan