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Re: Rectangular regions
From: |
Richard Stallman |
Subject: |
Re: Rectangular regions |
Date: |
Thu, 31 Oct 2013 16:22:33 -0400 |
[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider
[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,
[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example.
I've installed earlier today a patch which adds basic support for
rectangular regions. The entry point currently is `M-x rectangle-mark'.
Besides making commands aware of rectangular regions (currently only
things like C-w, M-w, C-y, and M-y pay attention to the shape of the
region).
This is an interesting feature. To make it really bloom,
we need to have a way to operate on a rectangular region
that works for all the functions that take a pair of buffer
positions.
The idea that occurs to me is to pass a start and end of the form
(rectangle . POS), to tell these functions to operate on a rectangle
with two specified corners.
One issue thaht will require attention: when we properly handle
formatting with variable with fonts, a rectangle will be defined
by two horizontal positions, and each line will need a computation
to determine which characters are between those positions.
As we implement support for rectangular region in primitives,
we should do it in a way that will handle this in the future.
--
Dr Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation
51 Franklin St
Boston MA 02110
USA
www.fsf.org www.gnu.org
Skype: No way! That's nonfree (freedom-denying) software.
Use Ekiga or an ordinary phone call.
- Re: Rectangular regions, (continued)