Re: Customize fringe

[Robert J. Chassell]

On 2002 May 10, Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> wrote:

   In any case, I think general fringe on/off will be less useful
   once fringes are per buffer/window rather than per frame.

Yes, this is definitely true.  Indeed, I tend to think of all toggles
as per-buffer rather than per-frame, even though I know they are not.

This is because I seen the buffer as the fundamental unit: the place
where one works, the place that holds files, the place where commands
go and messages come from (in my mental model of what Emacs does, a
mini-buffer/echo area applies only to the current buffer, not to a
frame); when I run an external process, such as grep, I see it as
within a buffer, and independent of other buffers.

That, by the way, is why I expect one instance of Emacs to be able to
run multiple Emacs Lisp processes at the same time and am still, often
surprised that Emacs cannot -- I know the difficulties of doing this;
I am saying that the feature is contrary to my expectation.

In other words, I think of a buffer metaphorically as a `place', such
as an island in an ocean.  I can approach such an island in various
ways; that is to say, I can open several windows on the same buffer;
and different buffers have different features available to me.  Dired
buffers enable me to do some things, *cvs* buffers enable me to do
other things, buffers visiting files enable be to do yet different
actions.  Moreover, I can copy from one island to another using the
`kill' command.  

Note how the naming of the `kill' command comes from a different
metaphor.  In a metaphor based on place, `kill' is the wrong metaphor;
the word should be `clip', as in clipping the blossom off of a flower.
But where text is seen as a living entity that a god can kill
resurrect, `kill' become the right metaphor.  The `cut', `paste'
metaphor comes from the old practice, which I engaged in before
computers, of cutting segments of text out of pages, and pasting them
onto fresh paper so the resulting document has the segments of text in
a different order.

-- 
    Robert J. Chassell                  address@hidden
    Rattlesnake Enterprises             http://www.rattlesnake.com