Re: Variable-width font indentation

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Stefan Monnier <address@hidden>
> Date: Wed, 07 Mar 2018 23:50:45 -0500
> 
> >> In your world, concretely, what happens when I open xdisp.c and press M-x
> >> variable-pitch-mode? Does everything look misaligned until I M-x
> >> indent-region the whole file?
> > Yes.  It isn't different from what happens when you change tab-width.
> 
> It's different in one important way:
> - it's considered normal to impose that everyone who looks/edits this
>   file needs to have tad-width set to a particular value (8,
>   traditionally).
> - it's not considered normal to impose that everyone who looks/edits
>   this file needs to use the same *font*.

The above doesn't force any particular font, just a fixed-pitch one, a
limitation we already have today.  So we will be no worse.

> Also, you can easily circumvent the tag-width issue by not using TABs in
> your file, whereas it's hard to have a file whose appearance is not
> affected by the choice of font.

Yes, using variable-pitch fonts in code where indentation is important
has its disadvantages, and always will.  Any solution will have the
same issues, just under different use cases and situations.  That's
why this is not the main use case where we should support
variable-pitch fonts well, the main use case is in text-related modes,
where in many/most cases the indentation is rigid or changes
proportionally with the width of some canonical character.