Subject: Re: bug#7004: 23.2; In fullscreen mode, the echo area takes too much vertical space

From: Tassilo Horn <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 17 Mar 2011 21:31:52 +0100

Dani Moncayo <[email-masked]> writes:

Hi Dani,

>> Emacs issues size hints to the window manager, which tells it the
>> width and height of how emacs wants to be painted.  These sizes are
>> exactly divisible by the number of lines/columns emacs should
>> display, which depends on font size and stuff like that.
>
> With my previous approach, there would be no need for such hints.

Window manager hints are nothing special about emacs:

  http://standards.freedesktop.org/wm-spec/wm-spec-latest.html

> Emacs should be able to adapt itself to any pixel size imposed by the
> window manager (which in turn obeys to the user).

I don't see what would be the benefit of your approach.  What's the
value of being able to see half or quarter lines/columns?

Well, there's one case, where I can see it being useful, and that's when
images are shown in a buffer that also contains text, because images
occupy exactly one column/line, just like a huge glyph.  In contrast to
browsers, emacs doesn't use standard GTK or Qt canvas, where you get
that for free, but underly other restrictions which are more crucial to
emacs.

Bye,
Tassilo