Subject: Re: bug#52183: 29.0.50; Empty space in the mode line if server-mode is active

From: Eli Zaretskii <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 04 Dec 2021 21:36:43 +0200

> From: Lars Ingebrigtsen <[email-masked]>
> Cc: [email-masked],  [email-masked]
> Date: Sat, 04 Dec 2021 20:04:52 +0100
> 
> Eli Zaretskii <[email-masked]> writes:
> 
> > Bottom line: I think to make this work as intended, bindings.el should
> > be modified to produce a Lisp string from all those 4 elements, by
> > concatenating them, and then the min-width display spec should be put
> > on the result of the concatenation.
> 
> I thought we were going to fix min-width so that that machinery was also
> called on the C strings (that are going to end up having the text
> property added afterwards)?

I still plan on doing that, but I don't see how it would help here.
AFAIU, it will make the result worse.

The main point of what I wrote is that we actually display the whole
5-to-6 character sequence of indicators as 4 separate strings, not as
a single string made of concatenation of those 4.  So even if/when the
min-width stuff is fixed as we discussed, you will have 4 strings
displayed one after the other, and each one of them has the min-width
spec, so each one of them will be displayed as at least 5 characters.
And that's not what you want here.