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

[Kim F. Storm]

alveola@petrofsky.org (Alveola Petrofsky) writes:

> In emacs 21.1:
> 
> Some of the bugs reported below everyone will agree are bugs.  Others
> are more subjective, or clearly just feature requests.  Most of the
> feature requests are for features that existed in emacs 20.
> 
> Since 21.1 came out, there have been many requests for the ability to
> turn off fringes.  That ability has been added in the cvs sources, but
> I believe that, as currently implemented, it will please no one.  What
> the fringe detractors really want is emacs 20 fringe functionality,
> not the total lack of continuation/truncation marks that results from
> turning off fringes in 21.2.50.

The changes made to the CVS sources are a "work in progress".
Personally, I agree with most of your observations, and I have looked
at some of them already.  However, most of the necessary changes
are non-trivial, so I decided to wait until I had more time and better
understanding of the display engine...

Regarding the unit for specifying the width of the fringes in pixels
or as a ratio of the column width, this has been discussed intensively
among the developers (all methods has both advantages and drawbacks),
and it was agreed that the current implementation was the best
compromise.

> 
> 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?  The only point on which I see any reason to differ is in the
> specification of fringe marks: glyphs are used on ttys and bitmaps on
> X.  Is there any other aspect of fringes that's actually inherently
> specific to window systems?

I think it is under consideration to support fringes on ttys and
MS-DOS, (as well as the old-style continuation marks on X), 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...

-- 
Kim F. Storm  http://www.cua.dk