GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 770487
Draw/display soft hyphens
Last modified: 2018-05-27 05:17:48 UTC
After https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=647087#c13 soft hyphens have been used in strings to allow them to break when necessary. Unfortunately, this is a non visible character, so they go unnoticed in gedit, meld, etc. vim displays a space which is not ideal but better than nothing. Lokalize highlights the two surrounding characters (http://kepfeltoltes.hu/160825/lokalize-softhyphens_www.kepfeltoltes.hu_.png). The same way display of spaces (and non breaking spaces, and tabs) can be enabled, I think this should be available too. My personal preference would be to have something in between characters, a pipe like character perhaps, but keep the current width (i.e. a<soft hyphen>b takes the same space as ab).
Interesting. A pipe could be confused with the cursor. Maybe a vertically-centered gray dot? Anyway, I think it's entirely feasible, it should not be much harder than drawing the other symbols for the different whitespace characters.
A dot would probably be fine. The most important part is showing that "there's something in there".
It's unlikely that this feature is ever going to be implemented, so I close the bug.
I understand manpower is limited but not having this can have quite a negative impact so it is important.
I have opened this feature request instead, which is more general: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtksourceview/issues/4