Subject: Re: bug#12723: 24.2; Improvement: changing text rectangle kill/past and its integration with the kill-ring

From: Eli Zaretskii <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 25 Oct 2012 05:56:28 +0200

> From: Stefan Monnier <[email-masked]>
> Cc: [email-masked],  [email-masked]
> Date: Wed, 24 Oct 2012 22:22:20 -0400
> 
> > How would such a rectangular highlighting behave when some of the text
> > in the region is R2L and some L2R?  Will it select text in visual
> > order or in logical (buffer) order?
> 
> The rectangle operations do not currently pay attention to this (they
> work on logical order)

That goes without saying.  I was asking how this will be reflected on
the screen.

> the highlighting would do the same since the highlighting is there
> to make visible what the rectangle operations would/will do.

IMHO, this doesn't make sense.  The result will be complete confusion
of the user wrt what parts of text are being selected.  You should try
that if you don't believe me.

> Similarly, variable-width fonts and stuff would not require more work in
> the highlighting than in kill-rectangle.
> I'm not saying they're not relevant, but as long as kill-rectangle
> doesn't take them into account, the highlighting shouldn't either.

So we have visual-line-mode on by default, but rectangle regions will
disregard that completely and treat continued lines as one line?  Why
does this make sense?