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

[David Kastrup]

Juanma Barranquero <address@hidden> writes:

> On Sun, Apr 18, 2010 at 15:44, Drew Adams <address@hidden> wrote:
>
>> That's going too far, IMO. As Eli will perhaps point out (see bug
>> #5839), there are reasons that some users will want to widen Info
>> buffers.
>
> What I proposed is not removing that possibility, just making user n/w
> and program n/w two different facilities; one is a user commodity, and
> the other is (low or medium)-level infrastructure for elisp libraries.
> That the two are conflated is the result of library auhors not having
> other equally easy way to show selected parts of a buffer, I guess.
>
>> More generally, we should not remove `widen' as a command, even if in
>> only some contexts. Likewise, `narrow'. What we should do is provide
>> more user control (not less), possibly by creating a
>> `widen-one-level' command as I suggested earlier.
>
> No one has been proposing less user control.

Maybe clone-indirect-buffer should have a way to clone just a partial
buffer.  In that manner, info nodes and tar subfiles could get a proper
"unnarrowed" buffer of their own.

-- 
David Kastrup