Re: Emacs's handling of line numbers [from bug#5042]

[Juanma Barranquero]

On Sun, Apr 18, 2010 at 05:12, Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> wrote:

> I don't see why.  Both use-cases limit commands to a portion of a
> buffer.  What's the difference between these two classes of narrowing,
> and how would distinguishing between them be useful?

For the same reason that the narrowing stack that Drew proposes could
be useful: if I'm reading an Info node, my narrowing/widening
shouldn't interfere with the use of narrowing by Info-mode, because
that's just an artifact of its implementation. Being able to do M-x
widen in an Info node and seeing the whole buffer is IMO a "bug"
because it destroys the abstraction.

On the same vein, if I were implementing a package that needed to
show/hide portions of the buffer, I would likely prefer the user not
to be able to break the abstraction just by accidentally doing M-x
widen.

    Juanma