RE: highlight current line when Emacs is idle

[Drew Adams]

    What's the purpose of hl-column?
    Once the current line is highlighted, it should be easy enough
    to find the cursor within that line, since you have just one line
    to search thru -- right?

My suggestion was to (optionally) display the column, as well as the line,
when Emacs is idle. The aim was to save the trouble of searching through the
line, in particular for those with vision problems.

The library I mentioned, column-marker.el does what hl-column does
(highlights the current line), but it is more general. You can have any
number of highlighted columns (in different colors), and you can set the
column to highlight in various ways. It is easy to toggle highlighting of
any highlighted column or all such columns. One use is as a visual
line-length limit.

So, I can't answer for hl-column per se, but 1) my suggestion concerned idle
column highlighting and 2) column highlighting can be useful, generally,
beyond locating the cursor.