[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]
bug#22763: 25.1.50; Feature Request -- A faster method to obtain line nu
From: |
Eli Zaretskii |
Subject: |
bug#22763: 25.1.50; Feature Request -- A faster method to obtain line number at position. |
Date: |
Mon, 22 Feb 2016 18:06:37 +0200 |
> Date: Sun, 21 Feb 2016 18:42:52 -0800
> From: Keith David Bershatsky <esq@lawlist.com>
>
> A while back, I posed a question on emacs.stackexchange.com for a faster
> method to obtain `line-number-at-pos`. A user by the name of Constantine
> came up with `(format-mode-line "%l")`, which is indeed much faster. I think
> the draft code below may be just a tad faster, with the added feature of the
> POS argument.
>
> http://emacs.stackexchange.com/questions/3821/a-faster-method-to-obtain-line-number-at-pos-in-large-buffers
>
> A user named wasamasa posted a comment: "Be aware that this method will give
> you "??" for lines exceeding line-number-display-limit-width which is set to
> a value of 200 per default as I found out here."
>
> And Stefan posted a comment: "IIRC the result may also be unreliable if
> there have been modifications in the buffer since the last redisplay."
>
> The thread has received 555 hits in the past year, and several have star-ed
> it and up-voted the question and answer.
>
> The following is a draft in C based on the existing function
> `decode_mode_spec` that lets the user input the POS as an argument without
> the necessity to use `goto-char`. I'm not sure if it resolves either of the
> comments above. The draft is not meant to be a patch per se, because I'm not
> a programmer and am just beginning my tinkering quest into the language of C.
> I have been using it in my own setup for about a week and I haven't seen any
> ill effects. It can of course use some TLC by someone more knowledgeable
> than myself.
This would overwrite the line number and position cached by each
window for redisplay purposes. I think this is undesirable. More
importantly, the gotchas pointed out above will still be true, AFAICT.
My suggestion is instead to expose display_count_lines to Lisp via a
simple wrapper (that would need to take care of narrowing and such
likes, something that your proposed API doesn't do, btw). In my
limited testing I saw a 5- to 10-fold speedup as compared to
line-number-at-pos, when doing that. I think this is good enough;
applications that need faster massive counting, if there are such
applications, can implement a cache in Lisp and speed this up even
more.
Thanks.