Subject: Re: bug#18183: 24.3; table-fixed-width-mode fails with kill/yank

From: Lars Ingebrigtsen <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 07 Dec 2020 14:53:52 +0100

Boruch Baum <[email-masked]> writes:

> On 2020-12-06 15:30, Lars Ingebrigtsen wrote:
>> So I'm wondering -- has this ever worked?
>
> Are you able to easily try it in emacs 24 or emacs 23? From the wording
> of the original report, it seems that at one point the truncate-word
> with the continuation symbol was working in some cases.

No, anything earlier than Emacs 26.1 refuses to build on my system,
unfortunately.

> The mode in its current state isn't absolutely totally useless. It still
> succeeds in maintaining cell width as long as all words are less than
> the cell width.

Sure, but the entire point of the mode is to chop too-long words, I
think?

----
Normally it should be nil for allowing automatic cell width expansion
that widens a cell when it is necessary.  When non-nil, typing in a
cell does not automatically expand the cell width.  A word that is too
long to fit in a cell is chopped into multiple lines.
----

And the code in table.el seems to bear that out -- there's tons of code
to insert/remove continuation characters when things are chopped, etc --
it's just that that code is never triggered.  I guess it was broken at
some point during one of the rewrites.

Hm...  perhaps a productive way to try to find what broke this would be
to try to do some bisection on the table.el file alone, and hope that
table.el doesn't rely too much on other things in Emacs that have also
changed over the years.  I'll give it a go.

-- 
(domestic pets only, the antidote for overdose, milk.)
   bloggy blog: http://lars.ingebrigtsen.no