Re: Proportional fonts in the mode line (one month test)

[Kévin Le Gouguec]

Jim Porter <jporterbugs@gmail.com> writes:

> On 11/25/2021 5:29 AM, Lars Ingebrigtsen wrote:
>> Jim Porter <jporterbugs@gmail.com> writes:
>> 
>>> Yeah, if nothing else, the U:--- thing (I'm sure it has an actual
>>> name...) should be fixed-width. See the attached image for how tiny
>>> the CR/LF toggle is now. It's highlighted with the box just after the
>>> U.
>> Yes, that should be fixed.  Hm...  We could use m-dashes instead of
>> hyphens, I guess?  It'd be more work to have a different definition on
>> GUI and TUI, though.
>
> That might help, but is there also a "wide colon" character we could
> use for the CR/LF indicator?

I'm sure this is a silly idea, but…

Would it be possible to double down on the min-width specs, i.e. set the
min-width of each individual piece of "the U:---" thing to something
large enough to be clickable, despite the indicator char being narrow?

I'm not sure (1) this is possible (can the clickable area cover the
whole width given by min-width, or can it only be as wide as the
underlying char?)  (2) this is desirable (this would effectively pad
variable-width characters to display them at a fixed width… but at least
we wouldn't mix fonts?) (3) this is advisable (something something
performance?)…

(I tried messing around with e.g. mode-line-mule-info to make a POC of
this, to no avail; not sure if this means it's not possible or I should
get some sleep.  I'll test the latter hypothesis first)