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

[Lennart Borgman]

On Sun, Apr 18, 2010 at 7:38 PM, Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> wrote:
>> Date: Sun, 18 Apr 2010 10:00:45 -0700
>> From: Mark Lillibridge <address@hidden>
>> CC: address@hidden, address@hidden, address@hidden
>>
>>     The issue is that font-lock mode, goto-line, linum mode, and perhaps
>> other features need to treat them differently.  These features want to
>> widen to the "application" restriction when processing the current
>> buffer, ignoring any temporary restriction.
>
...
> IOW, by introducing 2 kinds of restriction, you don't solve the
> problem, you just push it a bit farther.

When it comes to things that needs to do some parsing (font-lock,
indentation, completion etc) I am not sure widening is always the
right mechanism. At least for multiple major modes in a buffer I think
something like "show me all characters that belongs to this major
mode" would fit better.

And that of course requires very low level changes to Emacs.