Re: Variable pitch text filling

[Jim Porter <jporterbugs@gmail.com>]

On 12/2/2021 12:56 AM, Lars Ingebrigtsen wrote:
> Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:
> 
>>> But they don't.  They shouldn't be shorter than a normal character here,
>>> because that makes them difficult to click, but they will change size
>>> individually.
>>
>> Putting a min-width property on each of them will achieve that goal,
>> right?
> 
> The goal is not to make the individual characters in U:-- not change
> displayed width.  To do that, you'd have to make each character as wide
> as the widest glyph in the font, and that will be really ugly.  The goal
> is to make the "-" wide enough that you can click it, which is why they
> should have a char-spacing property of "one normal character".

How bad would it look if the U:--- thing specifically were fixed width 
by default, even if the rest of the mode line used a variable-width 
font? Keeping the individual characters in the U:--- thing from moving 
around would be very nice. Getting partway there by using :min-width 
might still be useful for people who *really* want the U:--- thing to be 
variable-width, but it seems worse than being able to rely[1] on each 
character staying the same size (and in the same spot).

- Jim

[1] Well, mostly rely. Some stuff like setting an input method will push 
the U:--- thing to the right, but that's due to adding all-new 
characters to the U:--- thing, so I don't see an easy way to avoid that.