Subject: bug#17782: 24.3; package.el: searches don't see elided chars of package name

From: "Basil L. Contovounesios" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 07 Oct 2019 19:37:20 +0100

Lars Ingebrigtsen <[email-masked]> writes:

> Samuel Bronson <[email-masked]> writes:
>
>> When I search within the *Packages* buffer, my searches can't match on
>> parts of the package name that got elided to fit into the column width.
>>
>> Couldn't this be remedied by displaying the ellipsis using an overlay,
>> rather than actually including it in the buffer text?
>
> I've now done this in Emacs 27 -- in all tabulated list modes, which may
> or may not be controversial.
>
> If people feel like this is a bad change, feel free to revert.  It seems
> nice to me: `C-s' works more reliably in these buffers, even when bits
> are shortened.  But perhaps there's a bad user interaction somewhere...

I'm curious to know why the ellipsis is added as a display property in
truncate-string-to-width[1] instead of making the relevant text
invisible[2].  Isn't this behaviour too specific to this use case to
justify extending truncate-string-to-width with it?

[1]: Use text properties instead of truncating strings
67830e7569 2019-10-07 20:11:26 +0200
https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/emacs.git/commit/?id=67830e756911f0c262bb3a447e58b9ff6739a60f

[2]: (info "(elisp) Invisible Text")

Thanks,

-- 
Basil