Re: Emacs26: Quick thoughts on display-line-numbers-mode

[Matthew Plant]

I agree with this, and also think there should be more customization
options.

Previously with linum I set the background of the fringe to be
different from the background of the buffer, so that the line number
column was distinct from the rest of the text buffer. It would be great
to have this option back, especially as I was excited that the
background color would finally reach the bottom of the screen when I
was reading the end of a file.

I think the two options needed for both of us would perhaps be some
sort of format string (perhaps identical to linum mode's) and then some
background option.

That being said display-line-numbers-mode effectively saved my desktop
experience. I have a 4k display so I will often have four windows of
the same file open vertically. I was recently doing this with a file
that is about 2k lines and inputting characters was causing so much
slow down that emacs was near unusable. Of course, profiling indicated
and action confirmed that linum mode was to blame.

Additionally with this change I can finally get rid of the fringe,
which makes resizing via mouse much easier.

On Thu, 2017-10-05 at 14:38 -0400, Robert Weiner wrote:
> I took a quick look at display-line-numbers-mode (nice work as
> always) and had a few thoughts:
> 
> 1. The similar linum-mode when possible displays a subtle vertical
> separator between the line numbers and the left margin of the text
> area.  This helps to visually parse the numbers as separate from the
> text and helps identify where the first text character is.  It would
> be good to have something similar at least as an option.
> 
> Then linum-mode should be removed (maybe add an alias) so there is no
> confusion as to which mode should be used.
> 
> 2. The mode-line popup menu that displays/hides line and col numbers
> in the mode=line could be expanded to toggle this mode on and off
> locally and globally, as well as providing options for its various
> display settings: relative, visual and absolute.
> 
> Bob
> 
> 
>