Subject: Re: bug#41250: 28.0.50; Dired displays unconditionally ls-switches on modeline

From: Lars Ingebrigtsen <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 01 Oct 2020 03:25:42 +0200

Drew Adams <[email-masked]> writes:

> I'd argue (but not forcefully) for just "...".  As I
> mentioned, "…" is, for me, useless as an ellipsis.  I think
> it must be useless for nearly everyone, with a fixed-width
> font.

I kinda like … because it takes up so little space, and the reason we're
normally truncating strings is because they take up too much space.  So
using that limited space for "..." is counter-productive.

But this should be standardised throughout Emacs, and work out of the
box automatically on systems that can display the character and not,
which makes truncate-string-to-width less than ideal.

There also, of course, the issue of "well, if the call says 'truncate to
15 characters', how much should we remove when we add the …?"  Because …
usually takes a bit more than a single normal character to display,
while "..." takes three.

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