Re: Tick Reduction

[Stefan Monnier]

>> Clearly, we would benefit from a formal markup language (and one which
>> includes some way to align text into columns).
>
> AFAIU, markup is generally separate from layout, so aligning text is
> not part of what markup is supposed to solve.

Not sure what you mean: in order to know that the columns need to be
aligned, the code that does the layout will need to be told about it by
some markup.

>> Note that for the column display, I think we actually need an
>> extension to the current `space` thingy on the `display` property
>> which is able to align columns even without the buffer's data
>> telling the redisplay at which precise pixel position it should be
>> aligned (instead it should just add space until the columns are
>> visually aligned).
> This goes against the very basics of how our display engine is
> designed:

Yup, I know :-(

> it examines text one character at a time and makes layout
> decisions as part of that examination.  What you want would AFAIU
> require the display engine perform layout of the entire window above
> the line currently being laid out, before the layout of the current
> line can be performed.

AFAIK, the way the display engine works currently, when we process
a given char at POS, we have already processed all the chars between
`window-start` and POS, so I think we could handle the case of "align
with some previous line" (with some non-trivial caveats since it means
that future changes in that previous line would need to cause POS to be
re-processed, which may require disabling some optimizations).

Of course, to really auto-align columns, we can't just "align
with some previous line", but we'd also need to align with some
subsequent line, which means it can't be done in a single pass.


        Stefan