Re: fringe bugs and issues (and a couple display margin bugs)

[Kim F. Storm]

rms@gnu.org (Richard Stallman) writes:

> The usual way to specify display margins is to set the buffer-local
> variables left-margin-width and right-margin-width.
> 
> Perhaps fringes should be enabled and disabled similarly.

That would be nice yes.  It is on my private list of things to
improve regarding fringes.

> At present, anything that appears in the display margins is tied to
> specific text in the buffer.  I can't see how it would be useful to
> display anything about breakpoints that way in GUD mode.  You can't
> use display margins as a vertical toolbar.

Normally, I would set a breakpoint on a specific line of a specific
file - and as a reminder, gud could put a marker on that line in
the display margin - something an IDE debugger commonly does.
If display margins are not the right tool for that, well...

> 
> This might seem like a quibble, but the point is that when thinking
> about how to handle display margins, we need to think of uses for
> which they would actually do the right thing, not everything that you
> could imagine displaying at the side of a window.

Of course ... but I just grepped the .el files currently in
CVS, and there is not a single reference to `margin-width'.
So what *are* display margins the right tool for?


-- 
Kim F. Storm  http://www.cua.dk