Re: unnecessary fringe-indicators defcustom creates trouble

[Luc Teirlinck <teirllm@dms.auburn.edu>]

Richard Stallman wrote:

   The reason for this is to make it simple to request the usual options.

I do not see why you need a separate variable for that.  Why can one
not use indicate-empty-lines and indicate-buffer-boundaries to do
that?  Actually, I believe that the one option that makes sense for
most people is to set indicate-empty-lines to t (which my patches
allow to do via the menu bar).  But if for some reason that would not
be sufficient (for the menu bar) one could always (for instance)
change the current three non-alist values of
`indicate-buffer-boundaries' (left, right, other non-nil symbol) to
the values used by `fringe-indicators' (left, right, box, mixed),
thereby making fringe-indicators unnecessary, even for current
menu-bar functionality.

   But I agree it shouldn't get in the way of setting the other variables
   directly, if you want to do that.  So I propose this change.
   (I will also change the doc strings of default-indicate-empty-lines
   and default-indicate-buffer-boundaries.)

Still looks very unnatural and contorted to me.  But if you are going
to do it that way, then the docstring of fringe-indicators should say
that setting it to a value different from 'other outside Custom (or
the menu bar) does not work.  You would also need to change the Emacs
manual and the `default-indicate-empty-lines' docstring.

Another problem is that the first line of the indicate-empty-lines
docstring is pretty self-explanatory.  So somebody setting this
through Custom may not click on MORE and see the warning about first
setting fringe-indicators to 'other.

Sincerely,

Luc.