Re: Pixel-based display functions

[Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>]

> 	(Relying on the Emacs’ own display engine for wrapping /and/
> 	indentation in SHR is the essence of my earlier patch [1].)

I tend to think that this is a more promising direction, at least for
the short term.  Computing the pixel sizes from Elisp (instead of during
redisplay) sounds like a recipe for slowness (not only because Elisp is
slow but also because it's harder to make it lazy (i.e. not bother
doing the work as long as it's not displayed)).

Of course, the current display engine can't support filling text in
multiple columns currently, and extending it in this direction seems far
from trivial.
But I'm not sure how important this is at this stage.

OTOH, it'd be good to provide better support (in the redisplay code) for
column display as used in things like tabulated-list-mode
(e.g. truncating the text of one column when it would overflow into the
next, for example, or providing right alignment of text in a column).


        Stefan