Re: [Nano-devel] Whitespace display mode: extend it to handle newlines?

[David Ramsey]

Benno Schulenberg:
> In softwrap mode it can help.  I made a patch for it long ago, but
> didn't like the result: the visual cue is too small.  And nowadays,
> the linenumbers toggle gives a much clearer indication of where lines
> start.

You have a point with regard to the linenumbers toggle.  Although the
way it makes softwrapped text jump can also be a bit distracting.

> (Your patch has a small problem, by the way.  When in normal mode a
> line in the middle of a paragraph is exactly as long as the screen is
> wide, press <End> on that line and then <Home>.  See how the ↵ is
> printed at the start of the next line.)

Hmmm.  It's probably because the line isn't cut off properly in that
corner case.  Then again, if this isn't going to get in, there isn't
much point in fixing it.

> I would be more of a mind to remove the configurability of the
> whitespace replacements characters.  In the beginning, M-P worked only
> when the whitespace option was given with two visible characters in
> the nanorc file. But since nano-2.3.3, M-P shows visible characters by
> default. Do you think that anyone has added 'set whitespace "..."' to
> their nanorcs since then?  I doubt it.  And if a few people have done
> so, would they be seriously inconvenienced if we dropped back to
> showing always dot and chevron for space and tab?

Having a configurability option for it is useful in one other way: if
the font being used hypothetically lacks those particular Unicode
characters.  Although I don't know how common that case is.