Subject: bug#38485: "prettified" symbols

From: Eli Zaretskii <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 06 Dec 2019 09:58:48 +0200

> From: Richard Stallman <[email-masked]>
> Cc: [email-masked], [email-masked], [email-masked]
> Date: Thu, 05 Dec 2019 23:15:27 -0500
> 
> Would someone please send me a 10-line general explanation of
> what the "prettified" symbols feature does, or would do?

It displays symbol names in programming languages as pretty symbols.
For example, "lambda" in Lisp can be displayed as λ.  This uses static
character composition to do its job.

I suggest to look at the code, it's quite short and simple.  Start
around line 200 in prog-mode.el, where prettify-symbols-mode is
defined.

> In what modes or contexts would this operate, by default?

By default, this mode is turned off.  You need to turn it on, and it
is currently written to work with programming-language major modes.