Re: What improvements would be truly useful?

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: address@hidden (Phillip Lord)
> Cc: address@hidden,  address@hidden,  address@hidden,  address@hidden,  
> address@hidden,  address@hidden,  address@hidden
> Date: Sat, 10 Mar 2018 16:02:14 +0000
> 
> >> No. But, then Word or LibreOffice are not WYSIWYG either.
> >
> > This is just a minor semantic issue: let's assume for the purposes of
> > the current discussion that the definition of a WYSIWYG word processor
> > is what the Office word processors do.
> 
> I think it is not.

Like I said, it's a matter of definition.  And I just provided mine
(and I think also Richard's).

> My understanding of, for indirect buffers, are that they share text and
> text properties. So you cannot put a different visualisation over two
> indirect buffers, if those visualisations use text properties, because
> they will interfere with each other.

It is not possible with text properties, but it's possible with
overlays, which can be window-specific.

> Similarly, the text that you seen on screen is pretty much what is in
> the buffer. You can do things like put before or after strings in text
> properties. But then this will be ignored by everything other than the
> visualisation -- you can't search for them, for instance, because the
> user level functions operate over the text not the visualisation of it.

Since we mostly are talking indentations and typefaces, I don't
understand why would we need to use before- or after-strings in this
context.

> And, finally, while Emacs does provide notifications of change to buffer
> text both before and after, they are neither guaranteed to be paired nor
> consistent. Nor is it apparent to the listening function when they will
> not be paired or consistent; which is unfortunate as mostly they are.

Why is that part of the issue?

> So Emacs does not exactly have an MVC architecture -- it sort of has it.

I think your notion of MVC is too specialized.