Subject: Tabulated-list-mode wasteful properties
From: Boruch Baum <[email-masked]>
To: Emacs Bug Reporting <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 17 Jan 2021 02:32:52 -0500
List-Id: <debbugs-submit.debbugs.gnu.org>

Tabulated lists can grow quite large. In fact, the most common use for
the mode is the *Packages* buffer listing, which for me today clocks in
at 5211 lines * five columns. In the case of the *Packages* buffer, Performing

   (buffer-substring (point) (line-end-position))

on a sampling of lines yields 'PP eval' buffers of length ~500 - ~700
characters.

Most of this looks to me to be unnecessary duplicate data. In using the
mode for my own purpose, I see that the mode is putting all data of all
columns in an entry (row) in each and every single column, ie the size
grows exponentially by number of columns (in my personal case, ten
columns).

This isn't breaking anything, but it looks like bad design unnecessarily
hogging memory and filling buffers with cruft.

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