Nuking the fringes

[bji-emacs]

Hi all.  As some others on this list have stated, the new "fringes" feature 
of emacs 21.2 is quite annoying to those of us who don't want/need them, and 
what is especially annoying is that they cannot be turned off.

I have downloaded the code and am trying to figure out how to add an option 
to turn them off.  But I am having a hard time with it.  I think that the 
simplest thing to do would be to produce an option which makes the code 
relevent to fringes behave the same way as it does in non-windowed (i.e. 
emacs -nw), but it's been quite difficult for me to make this happen. 

So far I can tell that there is a global variable, inhibit_window_system, 
which is set in emacs.c, and that from there, the appropriate code paths are 
taken to not use the fringes.  Eventually, the window_system global looks 
like it stays set to Qnil when inhibit_window_system is true, and from here, 
lots of other code which keys off of the window_system causes the fringes to 
not appear. 

Also I think that the adjust_frame_glyphs() and 
adjust_frame_glyphs_initially() functions may have something to do with it 
... 

The crazy thing is that the word "fringe" appears very sparingly in the 
code.  It seems like the behavior of the fringes is distributed amongst many 
pieces of the code, none of which are obviously creating the fringes, and 
this makes it very hard to track down the code which is related to fringes. 

Right now I have the general feeling the the "glyph matrix" implicitly 
defines the fringes, but I don't understant the glyph matrix well enough to 
figure out how this is happening. 

Does anyone out there have any advice for me on this? 

Thanks, and best wishes,
Bryan 

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bryan Ischo             bryan@ischo.com                   1992 Mazda 929
Cupertino, CA, USA      http://www.ischo.com            RedHat Linux 7.1
------------------------------------------------------------------------