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

From: Drew Adams <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 18 Oct 2020 14:33:18 -0700 (PDT)

> 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.

This rings a bell (maybe).  I think the sort-indicator
problem might be a duplicate bug report, but I can't
find the dup now.  There are some inherent problems
with the rightmost column, IIRC, that being one of them.

(Dunno whether this helps at all.  Probably not.)