bug#27847: 26.0.50; mode-line-percent-position: line-based instead of char-based (optionally)

[Dani Moncayo]

Severity: wishlist

Hi,

AFAIK, the percentage(s) shown in the modeline by the variable
"mode-line-percent-position" are all character-based, i.e., the
percentage(s) is (are) computed based on the number of _characters_
before a certain visible character (first visible, last visible, first
in middle line, ...)

I'd prefer this (those) percentage(s) to be based on the number of
_lines_ instead, because that would give me the information I really
want to see: the relative _vertical_ position of the window/viewport
wrt the whole buffer (i.e., the kind of information that a graphical
vertical scrollbar provides visually).

So I'd like I could set some variable for switching to this way of
computing the modeline percentage(s).  I think that many users would
like it.

TIA.

-- 
Dani Moncayo

In GNU Emacs 26.0.50 (build 1, x86_64-unknown-cygwin)
 of 2017-07-24 built on ZVDES404
Repository revision: 6dc5d45c542a6f9cfbcf3e37d597c9e0efb3070d
Windowing system distributor 'Microsoft Corp.', version 6.3.9600

Configured using:
 'configure --with-mailutils --with-w32'

Configured features:
SOUND ACL GNUTLS ZLIB TOOLKIT_SCROLL_BARS

Important settings:
  value of $LANG: C.ISO-8859-1
  locale-coding-system: iso-latin-1-unix