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Diffstat (limited to 'personal/itches/emacs/form-feed.md')
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diff --git a/personal/itches/emacs/form-feed.md b/personal/itches/emacs/form-feed.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..e11c1af --- /dev/null +++ b/personal/itches/emacs/form-feed.md @@ -0,0 +1,43 @@ +# Better out-of-the-box display for FORM FEED + +By default, FORM FEED is displayed as a dumb `^L` glyph. This is +surprising considering it shows up in so many places: Emacs source +files, help buffers (e.g. `describe-mode`)… You can even see it in +source files of other GNU projects, like GCC. + +"Pages" are important enough to have their own navigation and +narrowing commands, yet their default delimiter is displayed as an +unassuming control character. + +I like the way form feeds are displayed with [`page-break-lines`]; +magit's `show-lines` blaming style achieves a similar look. + +Having this kind of display by default would make it more obvious that +this character serves an actual purpose; as it stands, it looks no +different from some stray CARRIAGE RETURN. + +This could be re-used by e.g.: + +- `describe-symbol`, which uses the following method to visually break + up multiple symbol definitions: + + ``` lisp + (insert "\n\n" + (eval-when-compile + (propertize "\n" 'face '(:height 0.1 :inverse-video t))) + "\n") + ``` + +- Custom buffers, where sections are delimited visually with a + 999-character wide underlined space. + +Full disclosure +: This reflection started because moving over this underlined space + with `truncate-lines` on causes the screen to jump horizontally. + This specific problem should be fixable without dragging FORM FEED + display into the discussion, but I feel like the latter is the + more interesting issue ([who on Earth] enables `truncate-lines` by + default anyway). + +[`page-break-lines`]: https://github.com/purcell/page-break-lines +[who on Earth]: https://gitlab.com/peniblec/dotfiles/blob/master/.emacs-custom.el |
