Re: Customize fringe

[Miles Bader <miles@gnu.org>]

Simon Josefsson <jas@extundo.com> writes:
> Either you have a fringe or you don't.  Same as menubar and toolbar.
> Size, content, color etc is additional configuration.  IMHO.  But I
> see your point.

My point was that, unlike menus or toolbars, people will _usually_ want to
do something besides turning fringes entirely on or off (presuming they
want to do anything at all), and that as a result, having `fringe-mode' +
adjustments is the wrong user-interface to this functionality.

Note that this is unlike the closest analogue (I think), scrollbars --
it's common for people to want to simply turn scrollbars on or off, but
the scrollbar location is merely a detail.

I expect a common case for the fringes, though will to be to want to
toggle between full-fringes and right-side-only.  This simply doesn't map
well to the name `fringe-mode'.

As to what the right interface is, I'm not really sure; I guess it depends
a lot on what people want to do with the fringes (personally, I think
they're fine, though I might want to use half/half if we could get it to
use some alternate bitmaps for that case).

> Of course, the Options->Show/Hide submenu should have a "Fringe"
> submenu similar to the scroll-bar, with common choices.

That's a much better user-interface than `fringe-mode'.

> If I didn't preload it, my fringes didn't go away when I started
> emacs.  I had to (require 'fringe).  Maybe I did something wrong?  It
> looks similar to tool-bar-mode, scroll-bar-mode etc though.

That sort of detail should be taken care of by the dependencies in your
defcustoms.  [e.g., with the :require parameter]

-Miles
-- 
97% of everything is grunge