Re: display word wrapping

[Kai Grossjohann <kai@emptydomain.de>]

Miles Bader <miles@lsi.nec.co.jp> writes:

> Using variable-width fonts more regularly has gotten me musing about
> display word-wrapping support (for the next version, not this one :-).

Cool.

> What I'm wondering is what other support, besides the basic `wrap lines
> at word boundaries' is needed.
>
>   * A text-property that defines left/right margins -- with display
>     wrapping the window boundary is probably not exactly right,
>     you often want some whitespace in there.

Do we want hanging indents, like in the itemized list you are using
in your posting?

>   * You probably want to turn off the fringe wrapping glyphs, but maybe
>     not the fringes...

There should be a way to tell which "visual" newlines are actually
in the file and which ones are just produced from line wrapping.

>   * Good support for display-oriented C-n/C-p (I'm not sure existing
>     methods e.g using `vertical-motion' work well with variable-width
>     characters)

What about "." in regular expressions?  What should paragraph
operations do?  (I'm guessing that C-a/C-e should move visually.)


Regarding the hanging indents thing, perhaps that could lead to a
more general mode where we always stuff things to the left/right of
the "real" line.  I think that currently, there is specialized
support for M-q in multiline /* ... */ \n /* ... */ style comments.
We could also use the "line prefix/suffix" stuff for editing LaTeX
documentation (are they called DOC files?), for using text mode in
comments, and whatnot.

Does this have anything to do with mmm-mode or multi-mode?

Kai