Re: mode-line face

[Miles Bader]

On Fri, Sep 29, 2000 at 02:44:46PM +0200, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> >  MB> I just got rid of the dashes entirely in my personal
> >  MB> mode-line-format; they're not really necessary except on a tty
> >  MB> without inverse video capability.
> > 
> > Good point.  Drop them on window systems?
> 
> Careful: the MS-DOS port defines a non-nil window-system.
> 
> To say something intelligent about what to do on MS-DOS, I'd need to
> understand Miles's observation (above) about the dashes being
> unnecessary except on a tty without inverse video.  Miles, could you
> please elaborate?  (Do we even have such ttys?)

The important thing is to make the mode-line look like, well, a line, so
that it stands out from the buffer text, and clearly separates windows.
For windowing systems, the changed bg color (and 3d effect) serves to do
this; even on non-color ttys (or B&W window systems), making the
mode-line inverse-video also does the job admirably.

The only case where the dashes are really needed is on ttys without
inverse-video, which were not uncommon when Gnu Emacs made its debut,
but are rather rare today (I've not seen one for over ten years).

There may be a lot of people who simply like the way the dashes look,
but I think it's worth thinking about getting rid of them.

-Miles