Re: info invisible changes

[Miles Bader <miles@gnu.org>]

On Wed, Nov 06, 2002 at 10:11:41AM -0500, Stefan Monnier wrote:
> > I think a lot of this stuff would become _much_ simpler if you could must
> > munge the buffer instead of using invisible/display properties (with all
> > their associated oddities), perhaps using text properties to store the
> > necessary non-displayed info instead of parsing the buffer for it -- of
> > course this would perhaps be a bigger change, since you'd have to modify
> > the various info-getting functions too, but I don't see why it would be
> > _that_ big a job (presumably the modified code would support both
> > text-property stored info and buffer-parsing, for backward
> > compatibility).
> 
> I disagree.  Especially since it's all customizable, it's easier and
> safer to keep only one buffer-format and change the appearance
> via properties.

Safer I don't know (though I suspect it doesn't really make all that much
difference), but easier?  Modifying a buffer is _far_ more straight-forward
than using display-modification properties (because lots of stuff in emacs
simply doesn't know about them or their effects, and happily proceeds as if
they weren't there).

-Miles
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