Re: Removing rollback from VC mode - request for comment

[David Kastrup]

Uwe Brauer <address@hidden> writes:

>    > I remember X-Symbol, but most of its feature set has been replaced by
>    > other things (e.g. input-methods, or \inputenc{utf8} which lets you use
>
> Do you mean \usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
>
>    > actual accented chars in the file).  Are you referring to the replacement
>    > of "\alpha" with an "α" and things like that?
>
> Do you mean (set-input-method "TeX")? 
>
> Last time I looked into that, my impression was this functionality
> included less symbols than x-symbols. Besides sub and super indices were
> not supported.[1]

IIRC, X-Symbol has a really large array of input methods including
completion, a "grid", and various forms of cycling through several
symbols.

The TeX input method is not at all helpful here since its purpose is
getting a single character in your file when knowing the full TeX
sequence which is pretty much the opposite of what X-Symbol does.

> I really did not get it to work well in a LaTeX file: either
> compilation failed or the symbols were displayed quite ugly in the
> dvi/pdf file.

The utf8x input encoding tends to fare somewhat better.

>    > These could be added via prettify-symbols-mode (which, like
>    > preview-latex relies on redisplay features rather than modifying the
>    > actual buffer's content).
>
> I am curious to see whether that would have performance issues on big
> files

Maybe doing overlays reasonably efficiently (like text properties are)
would be sort of an idea after decades.

-- 
David Kastrup