Colon separator. Need way to omit it.

[TBAMax]

Is your feature request related to a problem?

The 16x2 Displays have quite few characters. It would be nice if there is a way to omit the colon separator (":") between the Cursor Icon and menu items. To gain more space for the content.

The colon is set up in the CharacterDisplayRenderer

Describe the solution you'd like?

Possibly add this option to the CharacterDisplayRenderer constructor.

Describe alternatives you've considered

No response

Additional context

No response

[forntoh]

To omit the colon separator you can override drawItem in your own renderer. The default renderer inserts the colon here:

32  display->draw(hasFocus ? (inEditMode ? editCursorIcon : cursorIcon) : ' ');
...
39  // Draw colon separator if value is present and within bounds
40  if (value && cursorCol < availableColumns && (!hasFocus || viewShift < strlen(text) + 1)) {
41      display->draw(':');
42      cursorCol++;
}

Instead of adding another option to the constructor, you could subclass CharacterDisplayRenderer and override drawItem to skip the colon. The docs specifically describe how to create a custom renderer:

class MyCustomRenderer : public CharacterDisplayRenderer {
public:
    MyCustomRenderer(CharacterDisplayInterface *display, uint8_t cols, uint8_t rows)
        : CharacterDisplayRenderer(display, cols, rows) {
    }

    void drawItem(const char* text, const char * value) override {
        // Custom rendering code here
        //
        // You can append a cursor character to the text if the item is selected etc.
    }
};

Because the colon separator is controlled in a single function, it’s straightforward to customize by extending the renderer and overriding drawItem as shown above. This keeps the core library light while still giving you full control over how items are rendered.