bug#28785: 27.0.50; Wishlist: There should be a mode for .netrc and .authinfo

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Lars Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org>
> Date: Sat, 21 Sep 2019 10:58:19 +0200
> 
> I thought I'd take a what at this, but if I remember correctly, the
> consensus on emacs-devel was that this mode should just call
> prettify-symbols-mode.

FWIW, I'd prefer we didn't proliferate prettify-symbols-mode more than
it is already, because I hope it will go away some time soon, to be
replaced by true ligature support.

> But looking at that mode, it seems like it doesn't really work on
> regexps, and doesn't allow translating to strings?  It just takes
> literal strings and displays is as a char?

Yes, it's pretty limited.  What's more, it uses infrastructure (static
character composition) that was a temporary hack way back, when
automatic composition was not yet available, and we should at some
point deprecate and remove it.

> Does anybody remember whether this really was the conclusion, or whether
> there's another framework for hiding stuff that should be used?

I suggest to only consider the second part of that ;-)

In general, you can hide stuff with display properties, and I'm unsure
what additional framework you'd need for that.

Thanks.