Re: how to tell what's in the fringe? (lazy fringe)

[Miles Bader]

"Drew Adams" <address@hidden> writes:
> Turning off the fringe background helps a bit, but I guess I still prefer the 
> \
> or $ to the bold arrows (curled or right) used for this in the fringe.
>
> I don't use truncate much - I admit that $ is about as ugly as the fringe bold
> right arrow. But \ is much better than the fringe arrow, IMO.

You can change the fringe glyphs too, using `define-fringe-bitmap'
(though there's no way to make it just use a font character AFAIK).

Here's what I use:

   (require 'fringe)

   (define-fringe-bitmap 'down-arrow [32 32 32 32 32 32 168 112 32] nil nil 
'bottom)
   (define-fringe-bitmap 'up-arrow [32 112 168 32 32 32 32 32 32] nil nil 'top)
   (define-fringe-bitmap 'top-left-angle [254 254 128 128 128] nil nil 'top)
   (define-fringe-bitmap 'bottom-left-angle [128 128 128 254 254] nil  nil 
'bottom)
   (define-fringe-bitmap 'left-bracket [254 254 128 128 128 0 0 0 0 128 128 128 
254 254] nil nil 'center)

   (define-fringe-bitmap 'right-curly-arrow [96 16 8 8 72 80 96 120] nil nil 
'bottom)
   (define-fringe-bitmap 'left-curly-arrow [8 16 16 16 18 10 6 30] nil nil 'top)

   ;; A sharper, more obviously arrow-like overlay arrow.
   ;; I admit this resembles something from a bad ms-windows debugger,
   ;; but at least it looks like an arrow rather than a blob (which is
   ;; what the default overlay-arrow looks like).
   (define-fringe-bitmap 'pointer-arrow [16 24 252 254 252 24 16] nil nil 
'center
   )
   (setcdr (assq 'overlay-arrow fringe-indicator-alist) 'pointer-arrow)

   ;; Lighter-weight line-truncation indicators (my clever idea was to
   ;; use a dotted arrow-shaft to sort of add the flavor of an ellipses
   ;; to them).
   (define-fringe-bitmap 'right-arrow [4 2 169 2 4] nil 10 'center)
   (define-fringe-bitmap 'left-arrow [32 64 149 64 32] nil nil 'center)

   (setq-default indicate-buffer-boundaries 'left)


-Miles

-- 
People who are more than casually interested in computers should have at
least some idea of what the underlying hardware is like.  Otherwise the
programs they write will be pretty weird.  -- Donald Knuth