Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org
From: Jim Porter <jporterbugs@gmail.com>
Date: Thu, 2 Dec 2021 14:32:08 -0800
That said, I forgot to mention the most obvious case where the default
Emacs configuration already changes the width of elements of the U:---
thing: the newline indicator. For example, DOS newlines are indicated
via U(DOS)---. (Unless you're on a Windows/DOS system, that is.)
I use single-character indicators so that it's easier to cycle through
them without clicking on the wrong thing. The default is probably easier
to understand for new users, but I find it pretty annoying. Switching to
icons here would be a nice improvement if they were all the same width.
It was deliberately designed to annoy and attract attention, because I
was told back then that users might otherwise miss an indication
that's telling them the file has an unusual (a.k.a. "foreign") EOL
format. If this is no longer an issue nowadays, we could change the
default to be one-character no matter what is the platform.