Subject: bug#34476: fluffy whitespace in the mode-line, despite it running off the screen

From: Lars Ingebrigtsen <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 08 Aug 2020 13:18:10 +0200

Eli Zaretskii <[email-masked]> writes:

> You don't really have a string here, you need to generate it first,
> from several individual C and Lisp strings, and from :eval
> expressions.  Generating it involves employing some of the same code
> that display_mode_element calls, but in a context that was not meant
> for display, so I'm not even sure the result will be the same (i.e. we
> risk inadvertent changes in behavior).  We will also be consing at
> least one more Lisp string, so displaying a mode-line under this
> option will produce more garbage.  All of these are IMO disadvantages
> that don't exist in my proposal.

Ah, I misunderstood what you meant here -- I thought you wanted to
change my patch to call display_string on the result from
Fformat_mode_line, and then alter the glyph matrix.  :-/

But, yes, what you're saying makes total sense -- rendering the mode
line as normal, and then changing the glyphs to remove the spaces would
be more efficient and create less garbage.

I didn't think this extra garbage on mode line updates didn't matter
much, especially since `mode-line-compact' would be a user option
defaulting to nil.

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