Re: TTY Vertical divider face?

[Miles Bader <snogglethorpe@gmail.com>]

On 6/8/05, Juri Linkov <juri@jurta.org> wrote:
> > Should it use a different face
> 
> I think yes.  I'd personally set its both background and foreground
> colors to "white" to display the vertical border as a solid
> 1-character-wide white line.

Hmmm, it's an interesting idea in that it displays a "dashless" block
by default, but still does the right thing if the terminal doesn't
handle reverse-video for some reason (this used to be an issue in the
'80s anyway :-).

However I think doing that makes it harder to follow the user's
customizations, since such a face couldn't just inherit from
`mode-line' (it could inherit, but then would have to set the
foreground to something explicit, which would often be wrong for
customized mode-line faces).

A slightly more complex alternative would be to do a "face
displayable" test on the "vertical divider" face, and if it's
displayable, use a space instead of "|" as the character...  Then just
inheriting directly from mode-line would work usually.

> > (note that the actual face that ends up being used by this code is
> > `mode-line-inactive', even though the code says MODE_LINE_FACE_ID;
> > I'm not sure why this is)?
> 
> I tried your patch, but instead of either `mode-line' or
> `mode-line-inactive' it displays the vertical border in the
> `fringe' face.  But maybe this is good.  We can reuse `fringe'
> face for the vertical border because fringes are not available
> on text-only terminals.

It sounds like it's randomly choosing some other face than what was
requested, which I think is not good even if it often works out...:-) 
I'll try to see what's going on...

-Miles
-- 
Do not taunt Happy Fun Ball.