Re: Line wrap reconsidered

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Ihor Radchenko <yantar92@gmail.com>
> Cc: casouri@gmail.com, emacs-devel@gnu.org
> Date: Tue, 26 May 2020 23:46:12 +0800
> 
> > I tried to explain why this is impossible: either those lines will be
> > truncated or they will be wrapped (at some character).  There's no
> > other possibility.
> 
> I understand that it is impossible on master. However, without knowing
> much about the Emacs internals, I wanted to mention possible useful
> feature to be considered in the proposed patch. Since we discuss
> changing display code here, I thought that it would be great if the
> change also introduced selective wrapping/truncation. Now, reading your
> comment, I assume that selective wrapping/truncation is very hard to
> implement. 

We are miscommunicating.  The "impossible" part in what I wrote
doesn't mean the current code cannot do that, it means I think it's
impossible in principle.

Emacs can truncate a long line, which means the characters beyond the
window-edge will not be displayed.  Or it can display those characters
on the next screen line (a.k.a. "wrap" the line).  These are the only
two possibilities that I can envision _in_principle_.  But you seem to
be talking about some third possibility, and I simply don't understand
what that third possibility could possibly be.  What would you like
Emacs to do with characters that are beyond the window's edge in this
third possibility?

I'm confused.