RE: Key descriptions in *Help* are too wide

[Drew Adams]

    > I, and I think many others, turn the fringe off for that reason - and
    > because it is noisy/busy/distracting. I never need it, and I
    > hope to never
    > need it in the future. If we start using fringe as the sole
    > vehicle for some
    > functionality, making that feature available _only_ through
    > the fringe, then
    > we effectively impose use of the fringe. That would be like
    > making some
    > command available only via the menu bar, effectively imposing
    > use of the
    > menu bar.

    The horizontal scrolling works fine with or without fringes.
    So this issue is unrelated to whether or not truncate-lines
    is as good as manually adding "...".

I guess you are right about that. As I said, I'm opposed to solving this by
either using truncate-lines or fringe, because I want the buffer text itself
to not surpass 70 chars (or whatever limit is standard for *Help*).

    PS: Emacs has had a fringe of one sort or another since at
    least Emacs-18.
    People complain about Emacs-21 fringes only because they see it all the
    time, instead of them being relegated to the right hand side
    and with the
    background color (i.e. invisible until the text reaches the
    last column).

Perhaps I misunderstand you, but I use Emacs 20 every day, and I see no
fringe of any kind on the right (or left). My rightmost character (newline)
is snug up against the vertical scroll bar (on the right). That is, if I put
the cursor at the end of the longest line, the cursor is against the scroll
bar, with no background showing between the two.

This is a moot point, anyway, of course.

I won't argue that Emacs shouldn't offer a fringe, and I won't argue that
the fringe shouldn't be on by default. My only request is that we not design
features that _depend_ on users turning on the fringe, so they can't use
those features otherwise.