Re: Proportional fonts in the mode line (one month test)

[Yuan Fu <casouri@gmail.com>]

> On Nov 24, 2021, at 5:53 AM, Lars Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org> wrote:
> 
> I've now switched master over to defaulting to proportional fonts in the
> mode line.  Customise the `mode-line' face to get the old look back.
> 
> I've made the most obvious things that change size -- the U:-- thing,
> the top/bot, and the line/col thing -- use the `min-width' spec, so
> things should jump around (for those that care about that).
> 
> There's probably more things that should be handled that way, but we'll
> take that as we go along.
> 
> This is just a test: If everybody hates this default, we won't proceed,
> but we won't know unless we test it.  So we're now testing this on the
> trunk for a month.  Vote in a month.

I like the idea and have been using a proportional font because it looks prettier. The only complication is that with proportional font, there is no nontrivial way to right-align some text: In fixed-width environment, you just pad enough spaces, but in proportional environment, you have to pad (space :align-to (- (+ right right-margin) (PIXEL_WIDTH))) where PIXEL_WIDTH = pixel width of the stuff on right. And there is no easy way to calculate the pixel width of a piece of text. I have used some hack that extracted the font object from the face and use font-get-glyphs to calculate glyph width, but that doesn’t always work (you can’t always get a font object from a face).

Yuan