Re: fringe bugs and issues (and a couple display margin bugs)

[Alveola Petrofsky]

no-spam@cua.dk (Kim F. Storm) writes:
> alveola@petrofsky.org (Alveola Petrofsky) writes:
> 
> > The theme of this message is that there is no reason for the
> > divergence of X and tty fringe behavior.  Emacs has always had
> > fringes, it just hasn't used that name before.  The current
> > implementation of the new fringe features creates several unnecessary
> > and confusing differences between tty and X frames.  Why not use the
> > same terminology and provide the same functionality on both types of
> > frames?
> 
> I think it is under consideration to support fringes on ttys and
> MS-DOS, (as well as the old-style continuation marks on X), 

My point was that fringes always have been supported on ttys, they
just haven't been called that.  Unfortunately, it was decided to call
the new improved fringes "fringes" and treat the old fringes as
something completely different.  If they are instead treated as the
same thing, but with a few differences, and those differences are
made configurable, then the world becomes simpler and more consistent.

Specifically, those differences that need to be configurable are 1)
the width, and 2) whether you want the left fringe to disappear when
window-hscroll is 0.  Once those are customizable (on ttys and on X),
and the cursor-in-the-fringe bugs I mentioned get fixed, then you have
all the functionality of emacs 20 fringes, plus all the functionality
of emacs 21 X fringes, and it's all available on ttys and on X.  And
it's all more easily documented in the manuals, too.

> but a major problem on a (real) tty is that the fringes will then
> steal two columns which will probably not be acceptable in
> general...
 
Why is this a major problem?  If the user doesn't want to spend a
column on the left fringe, he either turns it off completely, or sets
the auto-left-fringe variable.  (He'll be able to make either change
from the Options menu item of course.)

-al