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

From: Eli Zaretskii <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 30 Aug 2021 19:06:20 +0300

> From: 積丹尼 Dan Jacobson
>  <[email-masked]>
> Date: Mon, 30 Aug 2021 21:13:45 +0800
> 
> 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"?  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).

The width information is only more-or-less accurate on text-mode
terminals.  I wonder how to avoid confusing users with this.

Does anyone have ideas?