bug#7561: Soft hyphens should probably normally not be shown

[Lennart Borgman]

On Mon, Dec 6, 2010 at 7:57 PM, Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> wrote:
>> The soft hyphen (173) is currently shown in the buffer. That is
>> unexpected to me though it seems to be a "hard problem":
>
>>   Soft hyphen (SHY) - a hard problem?
>>   http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/shy.html
>
>> I would expect it to be shown only if a line break happens within a word.
>
> Regardless of the controversies over its actual semantics, Emacs
> historically has tended to display all chars (control or not), because
> it is meant to give you access to the markup rather than its rendering.
>
> Admittedly, over time, Emacs has added various wysiwyg-ish features, but
> it is still the case that completely hiding a char, by default, is
> considered as undesirable since it makes it more difficult to manipulate
> it (delete/insert/move/...).
>
> So if/when we decide to hide such a char, it will be under the control
> of something like a variable which a major-mode can set to indicate that
> this buffer is meant as the rendering of a piece of text, rather than
> meant for editing that text.

That sounds very reasonable to me.