Is there a workaround for shifted characters in variable-pitch-mode?

[Dima-369]

I really love variable pitch fonts and try to avoid monospaced fonts where possible.

This is a slight issue with using avy because it uses an overlay to replace characters and it results in the characters being shifted a little bit as the characters have differing widths. This is often not an issue but is annoying once words start to break differently to the new line.

Here are some screenshots:

Here I invoke avy-goto-word-1 and enter character h. In this scenario, I want to jump to hello but as the words break differently the overlay ends up on the next line.

As an comparison, this is how PhpStorm does it with the AceJump Lite extension. The overlay does not replace the character behind, but is in that sense a 'real' overlay and has the benefit that the underlying characters are never shifted. Still, it is not perfect as the overlay hints sometimes do not fully occupy the characters below but I don't find that an issue for me.

Is something like this possible in Emacs as well or does anyone know of a workaround, so the characters are not shifted for variable pitch fonts?

[Dima-369]

I wondered if the overlay could be done with (child) frames, like in https://github.com/elizagamedev/power-mode.el for each overlay character. In that case, the characters below are not replaced.

But not sure of the work required to implement that and how negatively it would impact performance.