"Stefan Monnier" <monnier+gnu/emacs@rum.cs.yale.edu> writes:

>> > See my previous post yesterday or the day before on a separate thread
>> > for why I don't think there should be a "toggle fringe" in the menu bar.
>> This was it:
> [...]
> No this was not it.
> It was:

Oops.  I guess there were several articles in the thread.

> Admittedly, I forced the tone.  But I just feel like users might miss
> on the neat fringes just because they think they don't want them.
> If you turn off the fringes you lose:
> - legibility (chars stuck right next to a window border are more difficult
>   to read; the fringes act like a margin).
> - continuation glyphs (i.e. it's not the same as on console).
> - neat icons instead of overlayed text for the gud&edebug overlay arrow.
> - various future extensions like mouse bindings in the fringes.
>
> I don't think the tradeoffs are obvious to the first-time user (even if he's
> an experienced Emacs user) so she might make the wrong decision.  This
> is to be contrasted to other "similar" things like the menu-bar, the
> tool-bar, the scroll-bar where the user can be reasonably expected to know
> what she loses by turning it off.
>
> I'm not saying turning off the fringe should be a hidden feature.
> Just that it shouldn't be in the user's face.

I think that would translate into having fringe.el but no
modifications to menu-bar.el, meaning the user need to M-x
toggle-fringe RET or something like that.

The following has the modifications suggested by Miles; it uses
:require and it has a more flexible :type.