Re: Display slowness that is painful

[Chong Yidong]

Miles Bader <address@hidden> writes:

> Chong Yidong <address@hidden> writes:
>> I'm confused.  How does it make sense to display characters in \XXX
>> format instead?  Both methods produce gibberish (as one would expect
>> of a binary file).  So we might as well choose the gibberish that
>> redisplays faster.
>
> Because gibberish with a big "Gibberish" label (which is sort of what
> the octal syntax is) is a lot more presentable, and looks less like
> Emacs just fucked something up.

Maybe we should look for something that displays faster than the octal
representation, but is "clearly" gibberish.  Like a single "empty box"
glyph, for example.

Apart from binary files, are unibyte buffers used for anything?  Is
there any situation in which characters above 127, occuring in unibyte
buffers, have any user-discernable meaning?