Subject: Re: bug#44068: 28.0.50; Faulty uses of tabulated-list-format

From: Eli Zaretskii <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 19 Oct 2020 16:52:09 +0300

> From: Stephen Berman <[email-masked]>
> Date: Sun, 18 Oct 2020 22:00:13 +0200
> 
> On trying out the new tabulated-list implementation of the bookmarks
> list I noticed that, when clicking on the File header, the sort
> indicator is not displayed, unlike with the Bookmark header.  Then I
> noticed that the same thing happens in the tabulated buffer list (C-x
> C-b).  Then I grepped for all uses of tabulated-list-format in the Emacs
> sources and found the same problem in most of them.  The reason is that
> in these modes the width of at least one of the columns is too narrow,
> so that tabulated-list-init-header omits the indicator.  In most cases
> the problematic column is the final one, but in a couple of cases there
> are also non-final too narrow columns.  And I think these bugs are due
> to a misleading description in tabulated-list-format's doc string.  The
> attached patch corrects the doc string and the problematic uses of
> tabulated-list-format.  The patch also fixes a typo and tries to improve
> column alignment in timer-list-mode: this is one of the few modes
> derived from tabulated-list-mode whose column widths didn't need to be
> corrected, but the alignment seemed suboptimal; however, when the header
> line uses a variable-pitch face, the alignment is still suboptimal even
> with the patch, and I don't know how to fix that.

Instead of manually fine-tuning each column's width, wouldn't it be
better to use the string-trim capabilities that replace excess
characters with an ellipsis?

Thanks.