(defun len-no-prop (s)
                       (length (substring-no-properties s)))

this almost works, except not on empty strings

what is the idikomatic way to get the no-properties length of a strting?

If the string is taken from a buffer I think you can get it without properties.

buffer-substring-no-properties

Are you trying to determine screen position based on string length? There might be more direct ways to do that too.

I'm doing some hacky outline/indentation, where the indentation level is dependent on the # of whitespaces before the first non-whitespace character

lol, maybe I should just count number of ' ' instead 🙂

Maybe origami or one of the other folding modes has code you can draw from?

I know they didn’t do exactly what you wanted but there could be utility libraries in there.

actually, the bug was elsewhere and I blamed it on string-no-properties

the problem is: when I use string-match, I have to pass the underlying string to match-strinkg NUM

otherwise, it gets weird results (which are they passed to substring-no-properties)

the real bug was the incorrect way I was callikng match-string

I just found

(how-many REGEXP &optional RSTART REND INTERACTIVE)

Print and return number of matches for REGEXP following point.

found bug, resolved it!

I feel like 95% of my elisp time is spent debugging, and 95% of my debugging time is spent staring at the wrong line number

so if I could just stare at the right line, i'd 10x my elisp productivity

does this look obviously wrong to anyone? having issues getting some ignored files for greping

((nil .  ((cider-lein-global-options . "with-profile dev")
          (grep-find-ignored-directories . ("SCCS" "RCS" "CVS" "MCVS" ".src" ".svn" ".git"
                                            ".hg" ".bzr" "_MTN" "_darcs" "{arch}" "jib/target"
                                            "jib/dev-resources" "jib/resources" "jib-gae"
                                            "labcorp-client" "mdtoolbox-client" "cordova" "cutter")))))