Re: Tick Reduction

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Lars Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org>
> Cc: dgutov@yandex.ru,  stefankangas@gmail.com,  emacs-devel@gnu.org
> Date: Sun, 21 Nov 2021 19:25:38 +0100
> 
> Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:
> 
> > Sorry, I'm now confused.  You say the width of "L" will not be changed
> > and the width of digits doesn't need to be changed?  Then why are we
> > doing all this, if there will be no change?
> 
> The column/line specs use spaces to fill out (I think it defaults to
> three char positions for the L spec?), and it's really only these that
> will be affected by the monospaciation (in that spec).
> 
> > (And btw, displaying "L" normally while "1234" not normally is quite a
> > lot more difficult than handling all characters the same, because the
> > display code generally doesn't distinguish between characters.  Unless
> > you make "L" that "default character" whose advance width is used for
> > all the other characters, that is.  But if you do that, then what
> > about "C" in the column number?)
> 
> The L won't be displayed normally either, but like the numbers, the L
> won't be affected, because it's also as wide or wider than the "normal
> font width" (i.e., font->average_width).

Beware: with proportional fonts, the value of font->average_width is
sometimes surprising.

> >> First line without monospacification, second line with:
> >
> > For the "U:---" part, each dash character is a separate field, so what
> > are the benefits of using proportional fonts there?
> 
> Because mixing fonts here makes things look weird.
> 
> > For the line/column number, I don't see any significant difference,
> > barely a pixel here and there.  So I wonder what is this all about.
> 
> With this font (as with most fonts), the displays of the line/column
> numbers should be identical.  (Except for the spaces.)

I think we may be mis-communicating.  Can you take an example of a
full mode line and tell which part(s) of it will use proportional
fonts "as usual", which will use glyphs from proportional fonts with
monospaced advance width, and which will use monospaced fonts?
Because currently I'm utterly confused regarding what you'd like to
change there and how.  And consequently, I don't understand what are
the benefits of making such changes.