SVG Hack for Emacs Display Engine
Here's throwing an idea into the wild ( Emacs mailing list , Reddit ). How about using SVG for rendering in the Emacs display engine? The attached image shows the rendering as a proof of concept for feasibility. The top window shows the SVG rendering of the buffer shown in the bottom window. One obvious advantage is precise positioning of content including inline popups for auto-completion. This also precludes any major changes to the display engine data structures. Other use cases include feature filled tooltips, inline completion popup, multi-column layouts, watermarks etc In this hack, the elisp code navigates from (window-start) to (window-end) reading a line of text from associated buffer and displaying the same in SVG. I've used (read-event) and (lookup-key) to allow for key translations for navigation commands. Hopefully with a tighter integration, all of this will not be required. Positioning of point is one open area. We would need the bounding box of text for ...