Re: Customizing the mode line

[Manoj Srivastava <srivasta@ieee.org>]

On Fri, Oct 30 2009, Stefan Monnier wrote:


>> information that is much less important, like
>> the percentage of the file before the window start
>
> I indeed never look at it, but I'm uneasy removing it: basically I find
> it redundant when you have scrollbars, but in case you don't have
> scrollbars (e.g. in a non-GUI terminal) it's not redundant (but I got
> so used to using the scrollbars that it never occurs to me to look at
> the modeline for that info.  Actually, I do look at the mode-line when
> I need to figure out "where am I" but then I look at the line number
> rather than the percentage).

> What do other people think about it?

        I am not a emacs developer, but as a long time user I would
 prefer to have the percentages instead of the scrollbar, if there were
 a choice (I know there is not). But I would much rather preserve the
 percentages.

        I also find the scrollbar somewhat confusing: When the end of
 buffer is visible in the window, I would expect the scrollbar to reach
 all the way to the bottom, but it does not.

> I think the major-mode/minor mode display is important, but I agree that
> it often takes up a lot of space to display unchanging info.  It would
> be good to come up with some way to make it more space efficient.
> Maybe we could replace "(Mail Fly Abbrev Fill)" with "(Mail..FAF)" and
> then expand the FAF to "Fly Abbrev Fill" in a tooltip.

        How would this work on a non-windowed environment? Could a
 mechanism be devised to show the minor modes on user request, say, in
 the minibuffer?

        manoj
-- 
The major sin is the sin of being born. Samuel Beckett
Manoj Srivastava <srivasta@acm.org> <http://www.golden-gryphon.com/>  
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