Re: Customize fringe widths

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Tue, 20 Nov 2001 03:57:44 -0700 (MST)
> From: Richard Stallman <address@hidden>
> 
>     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.

I agree with everything you say, but I don't see any contradiction to
what I suggested.

Like you say, the current display code doesn't have a way of using
the text-mode \ and $ glyphs on graphic displays.  Therefore,
currently we don't have any possible way of switching to those text
glyphs when the fringe width goes to zero.

When (and if) someone writes the code to use the text-mode glyphs
instead of the ones on the fringe, I suggest to make that a separate
feature, independent of the fringe width.  Thus, instead of
automatically displaying \ whenever the fringe disappears, we will
simply display nothing, unless the user also turns on the text-mode
ciontinuation glyph.

> We should avoid adding useless generality just because we can.

The major effort in this particular case is to enable text-mode
continuation and truncation glyphs on X.  That is the effort not
directly related to what Kim is working on.  My suggestion was
intended to make it easier for Kim to concentrate on what he was
doing instead of embarking on a much larger project.  It so happened
that my suggestion was also more general, but that wasn't its primary
motivation.

In other words, I think what I suggested helps _avoid_ unnecessary
complexity, not adds it.