Re: [gnu.emacs.help] display margins

[Oliver Scholz]

* "Dave" == Dave Love <address@hidden> writes:

[...]
> The margins aren't useful for typical applications with the current
> API, as you found.  That seems basically to be dictated by the
> redisplay code, which must display glyph contents either inline or
> in one margin as far as I remember.  I suspect marginal stuff would
> best be done from a display list keyed by markers, but I don't know
> how that would fit into the redisplay and whether there are any
> applications for which you really want the current API.

> [I looked at porting an IDE thingy, written for XEmacs, which uses
> icons in the margins.]

Gerd Möllmann suggested in off-list mail to me that the "natural" way
to put text on the margin would be to use an overlay with a
before-string that has the according 'display property, analogous to
what is done for images with put-image.

This is fine for me.

I tried to put buttons on the margin. But unfortunately text there
does not seem to react on the mouse. I was going to send a bug-report,
but I had not yet found the time for it. Anyway: this is the code I
tried, that did not work but that *should* work IMHO.

(defun my-test ()
  (interactive)
  (message "hello"))

(let ((map (make-sparse-keymap)))
  (define-key map [mouse-1] 'my-test)
  (setq my-keymap map))

(setq my-string
      (propertize "test"
                  'face '(:foreground "blue")
                  'mouse-face 'highlight
                  'keymap my-keymap))

(setq left-margin-width 5)

(set-window-buffer
 (get-buffer-window (current-buffer)) (current-buffer)) ; updating the buffer

(setq my-overlay (make-overlay 1 10))

(overlay-put my-overlay 'before-string
             (propertize "test" 'display `((margin left-margin) ,my-string)))


    'oliver

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Oliver Scholz               1 Nivôse an 210 de la Révolution
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