Re: face vs. mouse-face text property

[chad]

On Jan 24, 2012, at 1:11 AM, Eli Zaretskii wrote:

I trust your experience far more than mine these days, but I have to wonder if empty rectangle might not be good enough for the suggested use case.

I doubt that.  The issue at hand is how to display mouse-highlighted
newline so that it is clear to the user it's a newline that (e.g.)
will be inserted when she clicks on it in *Completions* buffer.
Showing an empty rectangle hardly accomplishes that effect.

I suppose that there are tricky edges, but I thought that the first-order problem was being able to tell a newline or tab apart from nothing. If the use-case is more complicated, then I'll certainly believe that `something not-normal but not-nothing' is not sufficient. I had mostly hoped to improve upon Lars' `4 chars of garbage' experience.

I assume that C-x = DTRT with those empty rectangles?

You meant "C-u C-x =", I presume.  

Yes, that's what I meant; thanks.

In truth, I have quite a bit of very old tty-only experience, but almost all of it predates reasonable tty+mouse setups, so I tend to forget the mouse part in this domain.  I did check that mouse-selecting such a character in order to describe-char it was a bust, but I assumed (probably wrongly) that the mouse-case wasn't as interesting for the tty users as a the keyboard-motion case.

For the mouse case, I was wondering idly about a tooltip version of describe-char, but it seemed unlikely to be as useful as a special face for this purpose. 

Thanks!

*Chad