Re: Tick Reduction

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Lars Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org>
> Date: Fri, 19 Nov 2021 09:30:07 +0100
> Cc: dgutov@yandex.ru, stefankangas@gmail.com, emacs-devel@gnu.org
> 
> I think my suggestion was to add a spec that says "this bit of the mode
> line should take at least x pixels" (or "y times the width of the x
> character").  This would fix the issue with the column indicator.
> 
> And...  I think that also fixes the issue with "--" changing to "**"?
> That is, we'd have something like:
> 
> (defvar-local mode-line-mule-info
>   `(""
>     (:min-space 5
>      (current-input-method
>       (:propertize ("" current-input-method-title)
> 
> For instance.  That is, I don't think we have to go full table on
> this -- the number of affected mode line elements isn't large.  (And I
> don't think we can go to a table based lineup, because the mode line
> format is just too variable.)

The problem is how to select the appropriate "x character" to use as
the unit of width.  Different fonts will have different characters
suitable for this role, so how to have a default spec that will DTRT
with whatever fonts are selected on different platforms for the
relevant faces?