Re: scratch/tzz/auth-source-reveal-mode 4a7c98d 3/3: Create and document auth-source-reveal-mode

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Ted Zlatanov <tzz@lifelogs.com>
> Cc: monnier@iro.umontreal.ca,  emacs-devel@gnu.org
> Date: Wed, 24 Jun 2020 19:04:10 +0000
> 
> EZ> The natural features to use
> EZ> for displaying some text instead of what's in the buffer are 'display'
> EZ> text properties and overlay strings, and the natural feature for
> EZ> hiding some text is the 'invisible' text property.  So why didn't you
> EZ> use these features to begin with?  What am I missing?
> 
> I spent several fruitless hours in that direction. Since I didn't have
> more hours to spend, I went with the working solution I could
> understand. This didn't happen in a vacuum, I posted my questions to
> emacs-devel in the thread above.

I'm very sorry that I couldn't participate in that discussion.  I did
read its beginning, and at the time it looked to me that you were
getting good advice from Stefan and Clément.  I missed the point where
you decided to switch to prettify-symbols-mode as your basis; I should
have chimed in right there and then.

Can you please tell in more detail what caused you problems when you
tried using overlays and invisible text properties?  It surprises me
that you encountered such difficulties, as there are quite a few
features which use those facilities for similar purposes.  As a random
example, hl-line-mode moves an overlay as result of user commands,
which sounds similar to what you need to do.

Perhaps if you describe the difficulties you bumped into in more
detail, we could help you overcome them?  AFAICT, you never actually
described the specific problems you had.

prettify-symbols-mode (and static compositions in general) just aren't
the right tool for such jobs; we have much better tools for that, and
they work well for many other features.  I'd be very surprised if
those tools couldn't support your use cases.

Thanks.