Re: Major modes using `widen' is a good, even essential, programming practice.

[Alan Mackenzie]

Hello, Dmitry.

A bit late, but ....

On Sun, Aug 07, 2022 at 20:57:59 +0300, Dmitry Gutov wrote:
> On 06.08.2022 23:13, Alan Mackenzie wrote:
> > Narrowing is primarily a user feature.  Users can arbitrarily narrow a
> > buffer to ANY contiguous region of text.  So when a major mode needs to
> > examine text even slightly distant from point, it MUST widen, to be sure
> > that the text to be examined is within the visible region.

> Now wouldn't it have been nice if user-level narrowing didn't create an 
> *actual* narrowing but only some visual perception of it? IIRC there is 
> a third-party package which implements this approach.

I'm not convinced, given how well narrowing currently works.  I don't
think it's useful to debate how things _would_ have been, when they are
currently very different.

>  From what I've seen of feature requests related to narrowing in my 
> packages, it's always along the lines of "please add (save-restriction 
> (widen) ...) around the whole implementation".

> Are there actually user-level commands which should not ignore 
> narrowing?

Yes, lots and lots of them.  goto-char, isearch, occur, and many others.
It might be easier to answer the question which user-level commands are
not restricted by narrowing.

> If not, it would be better if user-level narrowing was implemented as
> something else (e.g. two invisible overlays). Then all other code
> wouldn't have to bother with undoing it.

But "all" other code would instead have to take account of the invisible
overlays instead.  I don't think this would be better.  It would involve
a _lot_ of work to implement and we'd be left with some other
inconveniences instead of the currently perceived ones.

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).