Subject: bug#29279: Sharing the margins

From: Joost Kremers <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 19 Nov 2017 01:47:30 +0100

On Mon, Nov 13 2017, Dmitry Gutov wrote:
> On 11/13/17 9:32 PM, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>>> I imagine workroom-mode might have a idea where they want the 
>>> padding to
>>> end up (to the left or to the right of all columns). So 
>>> instead of
>>> co-opting the ORDINAL argument to mean "cols will  total cols"
>>
>> We need to study the needs of potential users, no doubt, before
>> finalizing the API.
>
> Inviting Joost into the discussion.

Apologies for replying so late, I've been quite busy. I must also 
admit that even though I've been going over the thread, I'm not 
entirely sure what it is you were hoping to find out by inviting 
me into the discussion.

My personal itch prompting me to write writeroom-mode was wanting 
to get rid of any and all on-screen distractions while writing. So 
I want a full-screen Emacs frame (so none of the window manager's 
notification areas, panels, task bars etc. are visible) with only 
a single window displaying the buffer I'm working on, with the 
text centred on the screen, because modern monitors are too wide 
to use the entire width when writing texts.

So if I understand correctly what you're talking about, I don't 
really care whether the margins are padded on the right or the 
left, because I have nothing in the margins, so I wouldn't be able 
to tell.

I know from user feedback that people do use writeroom-mode with 
e.g., (n)linum-mode, or other packages that display stuff in the 
margins. Among them, some want whatever is being displayed in the 
margins to be close to the text, while other want it at the edge 
of the screen.

So, *if* I'm understanding the issue correctly, it would be best 
if the padding side were user-configurable. If that's not an 
option, either side will do, because there doesn't seem to be any 
clear preference either way.

HTH

-- 
Joost Kremers
Life has its moments