Jan> Andy Piper <andyp(a)san-jose.beasys.com&gt; writes: Then they must die. I hate this with a passion. If it looks like text, it should be searchable, it should be copy and pastable. On TTYs, Lisp widgets are delimited by extents. I wonder how slow it would be if on GUI displays those were converted to non-text widgets on the fly, in a special gui-dialog-mode?[1] Then we could have the best of both worlds. Of course, our layout widget would probably have to be super-smart since it would have to convert a stream of extents into a 2D layout of widgets. But there would probably be enough clues in the text-level formatting for TTY devices (a la Python's block delimitation by indentation). Jan> And that is actually a big problem some times. I have often Jan> wanted to just that. I don't want this now because it will Jan> probably be very hard to implement, I am just thinking about Jan> ways that allow it in the future. Hear, hear! Me too. Everything he said. Footnotes: [1] There is some provision in redisplay for cursors that are wider than one character; this might be an application, since trying to highlight a search target that might turn out to be spread across several widgets would be a nightmare. -- University of Tsukuba Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences Tel/fax: +81 (298) 53-5091 __________________________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________________________ What are those two straight lines for? "Free software rules."