A few times now, when developing Emacs modes, I have found myself wishing that there was a way of doing graphical overlays on top of the text in a buffer.
In one case, I wanted to draw arrows connecting elements in a Common Lisp buffer in order to visually connect related symbols with arrows.
In other cases I have wanted to highlight sections of text using symbols and graphics that floats on top (semi-transparent) of the text being edited.
I figured that one way of dealing with this would be to have the ability to overlay SVG graphics on top of the text being edited. I was about to start actually implementing this when someone pointed out to me that this would be completely incompatible with running Emacs in text mode (although I was thinking to myself that so is inline images, and that's a supported feature).
What is the opinion about this? Is this something that has been discussed previously, and if so, what was the outcome?
Regards,
Elias