bug#28648: Make mode-line number display consistent when both line and col numbers are shown.

[Robert Weiner]

On Fri, Sep 29, 2017 at 1:06 PM, Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote:

> From: Robert Weiner <rsw@gnu.org>
> Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2017 17:56:50 -0400
>
> When mode-line line numbers are on by themselves, L<line-num> appears.
> When mode-line column numbers are on by themselves, C<col-num> appears.
> When both are on, (<line-num>,<col-num>) appears.
>
> The latter is inconsistent and always forces the user to remember which is the line and which is the column
> number. Fixing this is simple, simply remove the parentheses which are no longer needed and add the prefix
> character to each number for: L<line-num>,C<col-num>. This makes the display perfectly consistent, easier
> to read and does not take up any more character space.

We had "Ln Cn" kind of display in Emacs 21 and before, and we changed
that to the current display in Emacs 22.1 (the change itself is from
Aug 2002).

​Was there any particular rationale for this?

I offered my rationale for this change above; can't we debate the merits rather than that we changed it long ago?

  Does it really make sense to go back after 15 years?

If you personally dislike the default display, you can always
customize mode-line-format in your sessions, can't you?

​As I noted, this is way too hard with the current code.  My patch makes such personal changes easy, so in the worst case, you could apply it but leave the display format strings the same.  I already have this installed for my use.  The issue is making Emacs do something better and easier to understand for a broad array of users.  Maybe you could just ask people to chime in with which format they prefer: (<num>,<num>) or L<num>,C<num> or even (L<num>,C<num>).

> Eli, would you change this for Emacs 26? It would be nice to have the consistency.

Well, we used to like the current "inconsistency" better.

​I assume that is in jest.  If not, please explain.

Bob

​