RE: not too happy with Emacs 21 vertical-line dragging when scrollbars present

[Drew Adams]

I still think that a visible affordance would be good; I'm not a fan of
having to discover things by accidentally mousing over them (or searching
for them by mousing around).

I agree that we don't want to reduce window real estate in any way for this.

You & RMS both mentioned a draggable area to the _left_ of the mode line.
Until now, I thought that was a typo. I thought Richard meant the _right_
end of the mode line that is to the _left_ of the scroll bar. Now I
understand that you're both speaking of the _left_ end of the mode line that
is to the _right_ of the scroll bar - is that correct? That is, the proposed
area to resize the left window is to the right of the window's scroll bar,
not underneath the scroll bar.

If so, then I don't think that would be very cool. Usable, but ugly.

Anyway, I agree that we should just forget about this for now -- if there's
no way to recuperate the space under the scroll bar. Perhaps an elegant
solution will make itself evident sometime in the future.

 - Drew

-----Original Message-----
From: Kim F. Storm [mailto:address@hidden
Sent: Tuesday, October 05, 2004 1:21 AM
To: Drew Adams
Cc: Miles Bader; address@hidden; address@hidden
Subject: Re: not too happy with Emacs 21 vertical-line dragging when
scrollbars present


"Drew Adams" <address@hidden> writes:

> I'm open wrt what symbol to use, and I'm not arguing that it be obtrusive.
I
> don't think we disagree.

Personally, I don't think a symbol is needed ...

Admittedly, it is not very intuitive that you can drag the small line
between mode lines, but the cursor does change to a <-> arrow when over
that line.

It would be much better if we could find a way to just drag the
scroll-bar.

One way would be to always make a tiny area between windows that you
could drag.  But unless we do it by reducing the qscroll bar width,
that would take away space that is now used for text display.

>
> My question was really about how to do this. I have no experience with the
> new mode line or using bitmaps etc. I'll consult the Emacs doc (when I get
> around to this), but if someone has a pointer or two now, it would be
> appreciated.

You can easily make a drag-able area to the left of the modeline, but
one problem with this is that the lisp code expects to be using the
window on the left side of the vertical line, not the right window --
you would have to modify the lisp code to deal with this.

It is much harder (impossible) to make a drag-able area to the right
of the modeline, as there is no fixed right edge of the modeline at the
lisp level [the modeline is simply truncated by redisplay].

But I think we have bigger issues to think about for the next release,
so I suggest that we postpone this discussion...

--
Kim F. Storm <address@hidden> http://www.cua.dk