Re: Moving point around empty overlays with 'after-text

[Platon Pronko]

On 2023-04-10 04:44, Ash wrote:
> Yeah, I think doing this "right" might require adding a new property to 
> overlays/strings (or giving an existing property a new value) to enable this behavior and 
> modifying C code. Not sure how viable that is or if it's something the devs would want.

I think it's even worse than adding a property to the overlay. You need common 
point manipulation functions to account for possibility of inlays, i.e. (point) 
for position before and after inlay will be returning different values, 
(forward-char) will correctly advance the point from the left side to the right 
side of the inlay, etc.

(on second thought, making (point) return different values for positions around 
overlays sounds horrifying, because this will break about half of all Elisp 
code written)

But inlay hints seem to be a common functionality for any modern IDE nowdays, 
so it might make sense to support them natively, without making major-mode 
developers resort to horrible hacks like described before.

--
Best regards,
Platon Pronko
PGP 2A62D77A7A2CB94E