Bruce Connor has an interesting new package up at GitHub. It’s the fancy-narrow package that, as he puts it, imitates narrow-to-region with more eye candy. At first I hated the idea. Being crotchety and grumpy, I’m inclined to treat “eye-candy” with disdain. After all, didn’t I rail against those who wanted Emacs to be prettier?
After a nice nap, though, I had second thoughts. What fancy-narrow does is identical to narrow-to-region except that instead of blanking the text outside of the narrowed region, it grays it out. The grayed out text is readonly and unreachable. The advantage of fancy-narrow is that the surrounding text is still there for context.
The disadvantage is that the surrounding text is still there. To me, the main reason for using one of the narrowing commands1 is that you see only the text you’re interested in and nothing else is there to distract you. Graying out the other text makes it less intrusive but it’s still there.
I still can’t decide if I like it enough to install but I can see how it might be helpful. What do the rest of you think? Is this something you’d find useful?
Footnotes:
As opposed to using it programmatically as a way of making the narrowed region appear as the whole buffer as far some Elisp code is concerned.