Re: non-breaking spaces in view-mode

[Stefan Monnier]

> The point is that for VM there is no CVS repository or anything like
> that.  VM is Kyle's thing.

Duh!  Isn't there at least a VM package in XEmacs's CVS repository
of packages?

> - In unibyte mode, emacs usually displays non-breaking spaces with a
>   white space. However, messages in the echo area (such as those
>   produced by C-x =) use a colored backslash and a space.
>   It seems that theses messages are displayed using multibyte mode,
>   even though emacs was started with --unibyte.
>   (I don't know whether the latter could cause serious problems.)

Yes, the problem is as usual that unibyte mode conflates the notion of "byte
value 160" and "char whose encoding is byte 160".  The first is represented
in Emacs by the char 160 (part of the eight-bit-graphic charset) while the
second is typically the char 2208 (part of latin-iso8859-1 charset), at
least in latin-1 locales.  2208 is displayed as "\ " while 160 is displayed
as " ".

> Now I am trying to follow your advice and use multibyte mode as much
> as possible. And this brings me back to why I originally started
> this thread:

> Wouldn't it make sense if in view-mode the non-breaking spaces were
> displayed like ordinary white spaces? I thought that the backslash
> was introduced to facilitate editing.  But certainly that's not an
> issue when one uses view-mode.

I think I agree, at least in the sense that "buffers which are not editable"
should not use the "\ ".  But if you open your C code files in view-mode
(kind of like vi's modal editing model), it still makes sense to display
nonbreaking spaces as "\ ".


        Stefan