Re: The future of Follow Mode - a proposal.

[Anders Lindgren <andlind@gmail.com>]

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>
> IMO, moving the code to C will solve only the marginal aspects of
> this.  The main problem -- the fact that the current display engine
> doesn't support windows of unequal width -- cannot be solved without
> deep changes.  We need to at least design these changes first, so that
> we have a clear idea how to solve these issues.  FWIW, I thought about
> this for a while, and didn't see any easy way of doing it.
>
> If we abandon the design goal of supporting windows of unequal width,
> the problem becomes much easier.


Windows of unequal width is something that we need to live with, at least
if follow-mode is something that a user can enable without affecting the
layout of a frame, like today.

Anyway, wouldn't it be possible for the display engine to do the layout of
the leftmost window (of a follow mode window group) using the normal system
for finding a suitable start location on even line boundaries. The rest of
the windows in the window group could then use the end position of the
previous window.

In fact, I think it could be supported today from lisp if only it was
possible to disable the part of the display engine that ensures that the
window start position is an even multiple of the window width, on a
window-by-window basis. In the case of follow-mode, the leftmost window
should keep it enabled, whereas the rest should disable this feature.

(The only thing that wouldn't work is if a multi-width character (like
control-l "^L") is partially visible. It will continue to work like today,
with "^" visible at the end of one window and "^L" at the start of the
next.)

    -- Anders

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