Re: Variable pitch text filling

[Po Lu]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org
>> From: Jim Porter <jporterbugs@gmail.com>
>> Date: Thu, 2 Dec 2021 14:32:08 -0800
>> 
>> That said, I forgot to mention the most obvious case where the default 
>> Emacs configuration already changes the width of elements of the U:--- 
>> thing: the newline indicator. For example, DOS newlines are indicated 
>> via U(DOS)---. (Unless you're on a Windows/DOS system, that is.)
>> 
>> I use single-character indicators so that it's easier to cycle through 
>> them without clicking on the wrong thing. The default is probably easier 
>> to understand for new users, but I find it pretty annoying. Switching to 
>> icons here would be a nice improvement if they were all the same width.

> It was deliberately designed to annoy and attract attention, because I
> was told back then that users might otherwise miss an indication
> that's telling them the file has an unusual (a.k.a. "foreign") EOL
> format.  If this is no longer an issue nowadays, we could change the
> default to be one-character no matter what is the platform.

FWIW it saved me from checking in files with the wrong type of EOL a few
times today.

So I think it is still a relevant problem.