Customizing Thin Space Display in Emacs

Customizing Thin Space Display in Emacs

[Kepa via Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor]

Hi,

When I insert a "thin space" (002009) in Emacs, it appears as an underlined space in cyan instead of just a narrow blank space. I use it as a number separator to clearly distinguish the thousands.

I suspect this might be related to the nobreak-space face.

Would it be advisable to customize the nobreak-space face by disabling the underline, or could this have unintended consequences? Is there a better way to handle this scenario?

Best regards

Re: Customizing Thin Space Display in Emacs

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Sun, 11 Aug 2024 11:42:26 +0000
> From:  Kepa via Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor <help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org>
> 
> When I insert a "thin space" (002009) in Emacs, it appears as an underlined space in cyan instead of just a narrow blank space. I use it as a number separator to clearly distinguish the thousands.
> 
> I suspect this might be related to the nobreak-space face.

Yes, this and other similar characters are by default shown in
nobreak-space face.  This is documented in the Emacs user manual.

> Would it be advisable to customize the nobreak-space face by disabling the underline, or could this have unintended consequences? Is there a better way to handle this scenario?

If you don't want these characters to stand out, you can customize
that face to look like 'default'.  I cannot say this is "advisable",
since our recommendation is to keep the default appearance, because if
these characters don't stand out, they can easily be missed.  But if
you want them to show normally, by all means go ahead and customize
the face.  There should be no unintended consequences except the
obvious: how these characters are shown on display.