Subject: bug#46859: 28.0.50; [PATCH]: Add option to truncate long lines in xref.el

From: Gregory Heytings <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 04 Mar 2021 09:19:50 +0000

>
> While you discuss all those possibilities, please be aware that byte 
> offsets have one more problem: converting them to character offsets or 
> columns might not be trivial, especially if the encoding of the file is 
> not UTF-8.  (Apologies if you already discussed this.)
>

We did not discuss this, thanks for pointing that out.

Is this not easy to do with byte-to-position?

What I would suggest is to use "grep -nbo '.\{0,50\}PATTERN.\{0,50\}'", to 
hide the byte position in the xref buffer, and when the user jumps to an 
occurrence to use something like (goto-char (byte-to-position 
(get-byte-position))).  Does that make sense?