[no subject]

[Daniel L. Weinreb <dlw at SCRC-TENEX>]

I wouldn't want to see more information like this in the mode line; you
just don't need it often enough for it to be made continuously visible.
It would be too distracting and use up too much real estate.

The reason it displays in pixels in Variable Apropos is that it, by
necessity, MUST be in pixels to allow for general font hacking.

However, maybe it should be changed to ALSO display in terms of the
number of spaces in font zero.  This might require a new "variable type"
in Zwei's variable-hacking stuff.

I'd also rather not dump alternate functionality by re-using illegal
argument values.  That is the sort of hackerish user interface that
often bothers people about Emacs; it is fundamentally not a very clear
sort of thing to do.  I'd rather have a general mechanism for handling
variables, and think of c-X F as a "short form" of a commonly used
command, namely, the setting of the fill column.  Reading the fill
column isn't common enough to require a "short form".