BTW, if you do debugging with gdb, the left fringe is very useful as well.
I hope there is also some other, equivalent way to get the same functionality, so users don't need to turn on fringe. It's OK for a display feature such as fringe to provide some additional _convenience_, that is, to provide some other feature/functionality in a more convenient way, but it should not be the _only_ way to access that other feature/functionality. If that kind of design creeps in, it will progressively force users to turn on fringe. Imagine if we did that with, say, the mouse, so that the only way you could access some feature was by using the mouse, not the keyboard. That kind of thing is never a good idea. Fringe, like the mouse, should remain an inessential option; users should not require it simply to be able to use some other feature. An obvious exception is any feature that is somehow inherently related to the convenience feature (fringe, mouse etc.). Also the indicate-buffer-boundaries variable makes good use of the fringes. Here, it seems, one must turn on fringe to get such a feature - not good design. How about also providing such a feature for people who don't have fringe turned on? For example, a one- or two-pixel horizontal line could be added to indicate this. It could be solid for top and bottom of buffer and dashed for top and bottom of window (with solid overwriting dashed when they coincide). This display would be controlled by `indicate-buffer-boundaries', just as the fringe indication is. Being flush against the window top and bottom, the dashed line would hardly be a distraction, and likewise for the solid line at buffer top. Only the solid line at buffer bottom would ever not be flush against the window edge. Almost no screen real estate would be sacrificed for this display, and the same functionality would be provided as the fringe alone provides now. Again, if buffer-boundary indication were somehow specifically, inherently related to fringe, then that would be another story. That is not the case, however. Someone has simply decided to implement a buffer-boundary indication using only the fringe. That is not TRT, IMO. I really think it is a mistake to implement things that depend on users having fringe turned on. This should be a no-no in Emacs design philosophy. Designers should be guided to think hard before they compromise this. I don't suggest that it would always be easy to find a good non-fringe equivalent, but the case of `indicate-buffer-boundaries' shows that it's not always hard to find a reasonable alternative. _______________________________________________ emacs-pretest-bug mailing list emacs-pretest-bug@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/emacs-pretest-bug