Re: Aborting display. Is this possible?

[Stephen Leake <stephen_leake@stephe-leake.org>]

Stefan Monnier <monnier@IRO.UMontreal.CA> writes:

> There's some general pressure to improve font-locking by making it more
> precise, with somewhat marginal improvements but fairly high
> processing costs (pushed to the extreme, this involves passing the text
> to an external toolchain that parses and type-checks and returns to
> Emacs the precise highlighting info; see for example agda-mode).

Did you mean "ada-mode" here? I don't find 'agda-mode' in 24.3.94 or
ELPA. I'm still having trouble with process communication, so I'll be
trying the new FFI mechanism next.

But your point is valid; I much prefer faster font-lock, rather than
less precise font-lock. I'm not sure my customers really agree; they
have not spoken up (other than one complaint that it's too slow on huge
files).

> So, maybe we're looking at a future where we'll need to provide some way
> for delayed/asynchronous font-lock refinement.

Ah, like a jpeg sent over a slow internet connection (at least, that's
they way I remember it; haven't run into that in years).

Perhaps it would be possible to define a subset of the full grammar,
that provides some meaningful level of font-lock, and is significantly
faster to parse. That would be a lot of work, but I may have to try that
if all else fails.

-- 
-- Stephe