Re: Customize fringe widths

[Richard Stallman]

    I think the fringe width (and its effect on the bitmaps displayed
    there) and the old method of displaying the truncation/continuation
    glyphs should be two independent features.

It would not be unreasonable to make them independent, but is that
work useful?  Right now there is no way to enable the use of the old
truncation/continuation glyphs under X.  Emacs assumes there are
fringes and uses only them.  So either we have to make the fringe
widths control them, or we have to add some other way to control them.

If there is an actual use for having no fringes and no
truncation/continuation glyphs, or having fringes but using
truncation/continuation glyphs, then it could be worth the effort to
add another parameter to enable truncation/continuation glyphs.
Otherwise, we may as well avoid the extra complexity of parametrizing
this, and use them automatically whenever there are no fringes.

We should avoid adding useless generality just because we can.  It
always has a price.  We can easily imagine generality without limit to
add to Emacs; if we add all of that, we will make the manual much
bigger (not to mention Emacs itself), and it will be worse for the
users.  We have to be selective and add only the generality that
carries its own weight.