Re: non-breaking spaces in view-mode

[Roland Winkler]

On Thu Jan 27 2005 Stefan Monnier wrote:
> > I've been using VM for more than ten years. Kyle, the author of VM,
> > used to improve it continously. Unfortunately, for about a year
> > there has been hardly any update. 
> 
> > VM-7.19 was released 29 September 2004, which Kyle announced with
> > the words "I'm back from the dead." However, this release contained
> > mostly bugfixes. Since then, Kyle has disappeared once again from
> > the VM news groups. I find this very unfortunate, but it will make
> > it more difficult to get better multibyte support from VM.
> 
> Isn't there anybody else providing occasional patches to VM?

The point is that for VM there is no CVS repository or anything like
that. VM is Kyle's thing.

> > - In multibyte mode, emacs displays non-breaking spaces with a
> >   colored backslash and a space.
> > - In unibyte mode, emacs displays non-breaking space as `\240'.
> > - Always, "emacs -nw" displays non-breaking space just as a space,
> >   no matter whether it is unibyte mode or multibyte mode.
> 
> I've committed a patch which should fix both of the above bug.

Thank you, I just downloaded it. Now I get the following:

- In multibyte mode, emacs always displays non-breaking spaces with
  a colored backslash and a space

- In unibyte mode, emacs usually displays non-breaking spaces with a
  white space. However, messages in the echo area (such as those
  produced by C-x =) use a colored backslash and a space.
  It seems that theses messages are displayed using multibyte mode,
  even though emacs was started with --unibyte.
  (I don't know whether the latter could cause serious problems.)

All the above refers to both "emacs -nw" and emacs running in its
own X window, so these are now always consistent.


Now I am trying to follow your advice and use multibyte mode as much
as possible. And this brings me back to why I originally started
this thread:

Wouldn't it make sense if in view-mode the non-breaking spaces were
displayed like ordinary white spaces? I thought that the backslash
was introduced to facilitate editing. But certainly that's not an
issue when one uses view-mode.

Roland