Re: Future of display engine and lines

[Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org>]

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  > Having support for multiple columns in Emacs would be cool, but it would
  > be a major undertaking -- it's hard to see how it'd work sensibly
  > without basically making each buffer somehow consist of many smaller
  > buffers that are then somehow arranged to be displayed as one window.

I think it's not as hard as thet.

Buffer display currently works with a structure which is a series of
display lines.  On a graphics display, each window has its own set of
display lines, Redisplay fills in the window's display lines top to
botton based on the text in the buffer.

It could have multiple segments for each display line, and fill up
one series of segments going vertically down from point A,
then the next series of segments going vertically down from point B,
and so on.

It would be considerable work, but it would not require much change
in the data structure of a buffer itself.

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman (https://stallman.org)
Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)