Re: Fill column indicator functionality

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Tue, 5 Feb 2019 19:47:20 +0100
> From: Ergus <address@hidden>
> Cc: address@hidden
> 
> I would like to have something simple like fill-column-indicator mode
> package https://github.com/alpaker/Fill-Column-Indicator.
> 
> (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. This
> is very useful, when coding old Fortran or Cobol, but also in C.

How popular are such extensions?  IMO it only makes sense to implement
something like that in core if there's enough demand, like with line
numbers.

Perhaps you should start a poll on Reddit about this, and we can then
see how many people would like to use such a feature.  Do many people
share you dissatisfaction with solutions that show fill-column only
when it is crossed, for example?

There are also some questions about what exactly to do with
continuation lines, and with situations where fill-column is larger
than the window-width.  fci-mode forces you to turn on truncate-lines,
and basically ignores fill-column values larger than the window-width,
but for a core feature we need to figure out what to do in those
cases.  E.g., your proposal of indicating fill-column with background
color will then cause unpleasant display with alternating background
around continued lines.  These aspects could/should also be discussed
on Reddit before implementing.