Re: Fill column indicator functionality

[Ergus]

Hi Drew:

Thanks for replying. I saw the page and I tried almost all the options.

My feature request comes from the fact that almost all the options there
are unmaintained and some look like patches in new clothes.

- Column-marker creates a mark only in the crossed lines. But it is more
 intuitive to have something indicating where is the limit before
 reaching it. Like a rule or a background color change.

- ModeLinePosition like ruler-mode shows the indicators in the borders
 and conflicts with spaceline and sml. But it is also far from the
 center of the screen. When editing there.

- FillColumnIndicator is the one I have been using until now, but it is
 abandoned since a long time ago (the last update was in December but
 it was to add in the readme that it is not longer maintained), it has
 many issues and incompatibilities, enforces to use whitespace-mode
 because is incompatible with show-trailing-whitespace.

- Column-Enforce-Mode is like Column-marker, but changes the rest of the
 line, at least for me it becomes annoying after a while. And also
 highlights the line only after crossed. (SO same issue than Column-maker)

There are other options in melpa: hl-fill-column-mode which is more or
less like column-marker.

I think this is a very basic text editing functionality (like line
numbers). And Emacs shouldn't need a plugin for this very basic text
editing functionalities.

On the other hand, making it part of emacs can be guaranteed to have a
similar clean appearance as you did with the line numbers in the last
release. So everything will be more standard by default.

But again, it is my opinion, I don't want to bother with this too much
because you are very busy people. Any design choice that can make it
better, more efficient or simpler will be fine even if it is not what I
had in mind.

Best,

On Tue, Feb 05, 2019 at 07:56:02PM +0000, Drew Adams wrote:
> > I would like to have something simple like fill-column-indicator mode
> > (but without it's conflicts and many issues) even if it only brings the
> > most basic functionalities. This is a very basic code editing
> > functionality that shouldn't depend of external packages (like line
> > numbers for example) in my opinion.
> >
> > It could be a line | or a background color change up to the X column.
>
> Haven't been following this thread; sorry.
>
> Have you looked at this Emacs Wiki page? Perhaps it will help - it mentions a 
> few ways to indicate a particular column.
>
> https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EightyColumnRule