Re: mode-line face

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Fri, 29 Sep 2000 23:40:06 +0900
> From: Miles Bader <address@hidden>
> 
> 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.

So you are saying that the original reason for the dashes was to make
the mode line stand out when the terminals didn't have the inverse
video capability?

Richard, can you tell if this is true?

If it is true, I'd be a bit surprised, since terminals support inverse
video for a long time, and Emacs supports X since v19.  So why the
dashes are still kept?

> 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.

Even so, I'm not sure we should do that right now: people might think
it's not GNU Emacs they are looking at ;-)