Re: Hl-line and visual-line

[David Reitter <david.reitter@gmail.com>]

On May 23, 2010, at 1:26 PM, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> I have one request, though: could you (or someone else) please post
> requirements for what these functions should do?  That is, of course,
> trivial with unidirectional text, but what about reordered text?
> 
> Let's say we have buffer text
> 
>  abcde ABCDE FGHIJ xyz
> 
> which will be displayed under Visual Line mode as
> 
>  abcde JIHGF
>  EDCBA xyz
> 
> Where should beginning/end-of-visual-line put point in each one of
> these two screen lines?


The first use case would be to jump to beginning and end of a visual line.  That means, if point is at any of {abcde JIHGF}, beginning would be at "a" and the end at " " (between "E " and "F").
If point is at any of {ABCDE xyz}, then beginning would be at "E" and end would be after "z".

This would cover my use case and C-a, C-e.

C-k (kill-visual-line) would probably need to be rewritten anyway.

A quick grep through the Emacs and Aquamacs source codes does not reveal uses in different contexts.


The second use case would be to actually capture a whole line.  I have functions that kill the whole line (from left to right).   They would use `kill-region' from X to Y.   The same goes for hl-line-mode, where ONE overlay is drawn.
So, these functions would need a new function such as "regions-within-visual-line" or so, returning a list of (from . to) regions, or some other means of identifying the region. 

So far for two requirements.

Are we going to have discontinuous regions?  When I set the Mark at "c" in your example, and point at "G", what is highlighted (transient-mark-mode), and what is killed?

I'm not quite sure what the general interface will be for other functions in such situations, so I can't help further with that...  (NB You're throwing some of the most basic assumptions away.   This could get interesting.)