Re: Question: add-face-text-property for 'font-lock-face?

[Qiantan Hong <qhong@mit.edu>]

I think in reality, probably not that many overlays are strictly required,
because each collaborators tend to author in consecutive chunks.
However it does require some more implementation effort to make it work,
because we need to color code every newly inserted text based on
its author. The naive way that create an overlay for each character
clearly doesn’t work (text property however works, because Emacs itself
always merge them). We would need to look at overlays around the insertion
point and opportunistically merge them.

I feel like using text property will be cleaner, but let’s see if there’s a right way.


> On Aug 28, 2021, at 9:39 PM, Yuan Fu <casouri@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
>> On Aug 28, 2021, at 9:36 PM, Qiantan Hong <qhong@mit.edu> wrote:
>> 
>> That’s an option, but I’m worried about performance because crdt-visuallize-author-mode
>> need to color code the whole document and that might be too many overlays.
>> Maybe one can lazily create overlay for visible part only but I feel like
>> at that point I’ll probably just reinvent an adhoc add-font-lock-face-text-property in Elisp.
> 
> I don’t think you need to worry about performance beofore there are thousands of overlays. Will there be that many?
> 
> Yuan