Re: Moving point around empty overlays with 'after-text

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> Date: Mon, 10 Apr 2023 10:00:52 +0800
> From: Platon Pronko <platon7pronko@gmail.com>
> 
> I think it's even worse than adding a property to the overlay. You need common point manipulation functions to account for possibility of inlays, i.e. (point) for position before and after inlay will be returning different values, (forward-char) will correctly advance the point from the left side to the right side of the inlay, etc.

Please keep in mind that point is a _buffer_ position.  So asking for
point to return different values when the buffer position didn't
change is like, to borrow from Albert Einstein, "doing the same thing
over and over and expecting different results".

> (on second thought, making (point) return different values for positions around overlays sounds horrifying, because this will break about half of all Elisp code written)

Exactly.

> But inlay hints seem to be a common functionality for any modern IDE nowdays, so it might make sense to support them natively, without making major-mode developers resort to horrible hacks like described before.

Well, maybe "someone" should reconsider whether using overlays for
that is a good idea, then?  Why not help-echo, for example?

And I don't think you've tried all of the overlay-related features
yet, see my other message.