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Christopher Lemmer Webber @cwebber

emacs: good at lots of things, bad at displaying really long lines

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@mkwadee well, some are better than emacs

by display I actually don't mean the UX of the visual rendering, I mean that if you have a line 10k+ characters long, emacs will start to choke on its display rendering code.

The reason for this, it turns out, is algorithm choice: gap buffers aren't good at this emacs.stackexchange.com/questi

@cwebber Ah, so you were talking about technical aspects and there I was thinking about how do I quickly get to a particular location (column) in that line. BTW, 10k is a *very* long line...

@mkwadee not when you're printing a lot of generated output at a REPL which doesn't pretty-print by default :)

@cwebber @mkwadee An algorithmic choice that plagues all the text editing software I can name.

emacs, vim, GEdit, elementary Code, practically anything else built with GTK+, CodeMirror (used in WebKit's WebInspector and GitHub), etc, etc.

I'm sorry I can't offer an alternative.

@cwebber Alan Turing wrote a paper on the long lines problem.

@cwebber I think it was Martin Davis who coined the term "long lines problem", but Turing was the first to publish a proof that it was obviously a joke for Turing displays.

@cwebber

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@cwebber I see now this was more of a technical issue than the UX joke I was trying to make but eh ¯\_(ツ)_/¯