Re: Bigger fringe bitmaps

[Yuri D'Elia]

On Fri, Mar 18 2022, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>> First/last column reserved when the "tty fringe" is on. On one hand,
>> potentially more wasteful than the overlay-arrow. On the other, it
>> would
>> be guaranteed to be a single-character only (and any character there
>> wouldn't overlap - making it clearly distinct).
>
> How many hours will pass before someone requests a capability to use
> more than just a single column?  We already use two with "=>", so
> going down to one with something like ">" will probably be considered
> a regression by some.
>
> So I think the current situation is better on balance.

I don't expect so. While searching randomly online for bigger fringe
bitmaps I've seen several people asking whether it would be possible to
put a character in there instead of hardcoding some pixels.

It is undoubtedly restrictive when you consider ascii, but unicode
expands that space massively. That 2-character arrow can fit in a single
glyph and look actually like a double-arrow. That's certainly my
reasoning: for most of the bullet/arrow requirements, we would be pretty
much set.

What I would expect to happen with such a feature on graphical displays
instead is the possibility to use an independent family for just one
symbol. Because we already have plenty of families designed for
iconography, such as fontawesome, but those families are not intended to
be interchangeable/generic. They're just repositories of glyphs.