Re: Please make the fringe configurable

[Simon Josefsson]

"Eli Zaretskii" <eliz@is.elta.co.il> writes:

>> From: Simon Josefsson <jas@extundo.com>
>> Date: Sat, 10 Nov 2001 15:00:43 +0100
>> 
>> 
>> The reason?  Some frames, such as Speedbar and Gnus Picons (Picons
>> doesn't work in Emacs yet, but perhaps soon) uses small separate
>> frames with special contents.  The fringe takes up screen space and
>> doesn't serve a useful purpose
>
> Doesn't the fringe serve some purpose if the file names in the
> Speedbar frame are longer than the frame width?

Agreed.  But I don't think that special case is worth always taking up
two 8 pixel columns of the frame -- using a "$" as the last character
on the line works equally well.  It is of course up to the Speedbar
authors to decide, but as a user I think it would be nice if it was
configurable, hence the feature request.

Also, Speedbar isn't the only exaple, there are other frames (Gnus
Picons, if that worked) where the fringe isn't very useful.  In
general, since it isn't a critical feature it would be nice if the
user could customize it.  Especially since Emacs already support the
case anyway, on ttys.

Changing the 8 into 0 in the following #define's in src/xterm.h works
quite well, altough not perfect:

#define FRAME_FLAGS_BITMAP_WIDTH(f)     8
#define FRAME_FLAGS_BITMAP_HEIGHT(f)    8

Exporting the #define into lisp, and making whether the tty
continuation characters ("\" and "$") should be used would almost do
it, I think.

If arbitrary bitmaps are to be supported in the fringe, making it
possible to change the height/width of it could perhaps be useful as
well.