Re: enriched-mode and switching major modes.

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Oliver Scholz <address@hidden>
> Date: Sat, 18 Sep 2004 19:08:17 +0200
> Cc: address@hidden, address@hidden, address@hidden
> 
> It works to some extend, as long as you are able to identify those
> newlines and space characters when the document is encoded again and
> written to a file.

If those characters have a special text property (put there when the
file is decoded), then such an identification at save time is
possible.

> This has some limitations.  David already mentioned one problem.  You
> are right, of course, that `next-line' & Co. would need to be changed
> to DTRT on screen lines rather than what you called physical lines.
> But I really think that this is the least of all problems.  Kai
> mentioned that cua.el provides such functionality; I counted three
> other packages that implement this.

That is where I think we disagree: I think that the amount of Lisp
code that relies on being able to deduce lots of layout-related issues
by merely looking at the buffer is HUGE.  You really do NOT want to
modify every Emacs command like CUA Mode did.

> And then there is also the point that this approach fails for the more
> complicated things: tables with different font heights, paragraphs
> with background colours and borders ...

I suggest to discuss that and try to identify the specific problems
that you think will cause such an approach to fail.  Then we might
have a better idea of the limitations of this approach, and could talk
about solutions.

In other words, the current design might indeed have to be changed,
but I think you will agree that such changes need to be kept to a
minimum, lest we end up redesigning Emacs.  Talking about specific
problems will help to come up with such a minimal set of changes.