Re: Clarify display-line-numbers width in manual

[Pedro Andres Aranda Gutierrez <paaguti@gmail.com>]

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Hi,

well, I was on the old linum package and now that emacs26 is widely
available and I started to get a weird
behaviour on emacs27, the time seemed to have come to move on to
display-line-numbers.
One of the things I'm only to used to change is that the line number field
has a fixed width (ie it doesn't depend
on the lines being displayed). And going through the manual, it was not
obvious at all how to do that.

s/fix the width/set the width/g

And let me think how to reword the 'display correctly' sentence

Best, /PA

On Sat, 17 Oct 2020 at 10:49, Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote:

> > From: Pedro Andres Aranda Gutierrez <paaguti@gmail.com>
> > Date: Sat, 17 Oct 2020 07:30:49 +0200
> >
> > I recently had to migrate to display-line-numbers-mode. It was hard to
> find what I wanted in the manual at
> > first glance, which was how to set the width of the line numbers to
> fixed width. It was somehow buried in a
> > paragraph along with other succinct explanations for other variables.
> >
> > Here is a proposal to highlight the variable in the manual
> >
> > diff --git a/doc/emacs/display.texi b/doc/emacs/display.texi
> > index a4040d9..ee76e77 100644
> > --- a/doc/emacs/display.texi
> > +++ b/doc/emacs/display.texi
> > @@ -1882,6 +1882,12 @@ Display Custom
> >  non-@code{nil}.  It has no effect when set to zero, or when line
> >  numbers are not absolute.
> >
> > +@vindex display-line-numbers-width
> > +Set the value of @code{display-line-numbers-width} to fix the width
> > +of the line number. Make sure it is large enough for the largest files
> > +you expect to edit (e.g. @code{4} would allow up to @code{9999} lines
> > +to be displayed correctly)
>
> Thanks.  However, I don't understand the motivation well enough to
> judge the patch, or to propose some different text to take care of
> this issue.  You say "to fix the width" and "to be displayed
> correctly", and that hints on, or could be interpreted as, saying that
> the default values yield incorrect display.  Which is not what I see
> here.
>
> So please tell what display problems you tried to fix by setting
> display-line-numbers-width in your configuration, and what information
> you tried to find in the manual about that.
>
> In any case, you copied the @vindex entry to your text, but left the
> original one intact, which would have the effect of having 2 identical
> index entries pointing to very close locations in the text, something
> that is undesirable.
>


-- 
Fragen sind nicht da um beantwortet zu werden,
Fragen sind da um gestellt zu werden
Georg Kreisler

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