🚀 go-pugleaf

I while back a posted a "folding mode" to gnu.emacs.sources.  One of the
features I would very much like to see in a future Emacs is temporary
formatting, because sometimes it is nice to be able to edit something
that doesn't look like the low-level text underlying it.  With reference
to a folding mode, the lisp code decides where text formatting should go
when Emacs reads a file (in the form of hidden regions of text), as
opposed to having it as part of the file itself (and in fact changes the
view, which I would like to do without modifying the text of the file).
Emacs already has a simple capability for hiding some text by narrowing,
and a slightly more destructive technique for selective-display.

Similar ideas apply to other program-specified formatting, such as
colours in a C program, or highlighted menus in an Info buffer.  Those
things ought not to be stored as part of the text, although where they
are placed at edit time is determined by the text, as interpreted by the
lisp code that looks at it.

I would much rather see a facility wherby the text displayed in a
particular window is determined by some lisp structure, which holds
something like a list, whose elements each refers to a region of text
from an arbitrary buffer, and some property information.  Then
information from several buffers could be displayed.  I think this would
be most useful for displaying bits of text from a buffer, and a little
more text from a temporary buffer, so for example Emacs could display
some dynamic, informative symbols in a document being word-processed,
but which are not truly part of the text.  Would that really be so
difficult to implement?

Jamie
--
Wibble.