Re: Where is the vertical-border char set?

[Trent W. Buck]

Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> writes:

>> From: address@hidden (Trent W. Buck)
>> Date: Wed, 30 Apr 2014 17:55:52 +1000
>> 
>> Stupidly, I started doing this today:
>> 
>>     (setq mode-line-end-spaces (make-string 1024 ?─))
>> 
>> It makes the modeline look prettier (except when it doesn't).
>> The 1024 is arbitrary, it replaces %- (infinite MINUS HYPHEN).
>> I can't see how to ask for infinity of an arbitrary codepoint.
>
> What's wrong with 1024?  If that might be too few, enlarge it.

It works; it just feels inelegant compared to %-.

>> I want to do the same thing for the vertical-border character,
>
> I hope by "do the same thing" you do NOT mean to have 1024 characters
> as the border, but rather replace "|" with some non-ASCII character.
>
>> Where do I set that?
>
> It hides in one of the extra slots of the display table.  See the node
> "Display Tables" in the ELisp manual.

Ah, thanks -- I found disp-table but from reading it I thought it was
only used for M-x list charset chars RET, and (make-display-table)
didn't use a "|" as its default vertical-border, which fooled me.

> Yes, something like
>
>   (set-display-table-slot (setq standard-display-table (make-display-table))
>                           'vertical-border ?│)

This works for me:
(set-display-table-slot standard-display-table 'vertical-border ?│)

> But beware: the character you use must be encodable by your
> terminal-coding-system, otherwise you will get a question mark "?"
> instead of your fancy character.
>
> (Personally, I question the utility of doing what you want, but that's
> me.)

Understood; thus the "Stupidly" at the start of my email.

Anywhere modern enough that I have Emacs and dotfiles installed,
bloody well ought to be UTF-8 throughout, so I'm not to worried.
If it annoys me I'll just turn it off again.

It already looks funny in DejaVu Sans Mono at certain :pixelsize's,
because the hinter makes the "ends" of each char a bit fatter, so you
end up with a fuzzy pulse.  Oh well.