Subject: Re: bug#50272: describe-char and C-u C-x = neglect mentioning anything about width

From: Lars Ingebrigtsen <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 22 Aug 2022 18:52:04 +0200

Eli Zaretskii <[email-masked]> writes:

>> describe-char and C-u C-x = neglect mentioning anything about width. Try
>> them on
>> $ unicode --max 0 --brief -r BOX.*X
>> ☒ U+2612 BALLOT BOX WITH X
>> ⮽ U+2BBD BALLOT BOX WITH LIGHT X
>> 🗵 U+1F5F5 BALLOT BOX WITH SCRIPT X
>> 🗷 U+1F5F7 BALLOT BOX WITH BOLD SCRIPT X
>> They go into great detail, but miss mentioning width.
>
> You mean, you'd like to see which characters are "double-width"?

All of these are "single-width", as far as I can tell?

(elt char-width-table ?⮽)
=> 1

We mostly have the double-widthness for East Asian characters:

(elt char-width-table ?㊟)
=> 2

> We could add that, but on GUI frames that would just confuse, because
> those "double-width" characters more often than not take less than two
> full columns, especially if you happen to use variable-pitch font for
> such exotic characters (something that happens quite a lot).

That, in conjunction with all so many characters being wider visually
than the "double-width" characters makes me thing that displaying this
information would just be confusing all around.  So I'm closing this as
a "wontfix".