GNU ELPA - spacious-padding

The new user option spacious-padding-subtle-frame-lines supersedes the ~spacious-padding-subtle-mode-line. It does the same thing, namely, of making the mode lines use only a thin line instead of a background. Though it extends this feature to header lines as well.

The documentation string of spacious-padding-subtle-frame-lines describes the technicalities and includes examples. In short, we can associate a keyword with either a face that has a foreground color or a color value directly. For the convenience of the user, the package also defines the faces spacious-padding-line-active and spacious-padding-line-inactive. Here is a sample configuration:

;; Read the doc string of `spacious-padding-subtle-mode-line' as it
;; is very flexible.  Here we make the mode lines be a single
;; overline, while header lines have an underline.
(setq spacious-padding-subtle-frame-lines
      '( :mode-line-active spacious-padding-line-active
         :mode-line-inactive spacious-padding-line-inactive
         :header-line-active spacious-padding-line-active
         :header-line-inactive spacious-padding-line-inactive))

In the future, we might decide that other elements can benefit from this style.

As noted above, when spacious-padding-subtle-frame-lines is configured to cover header lines, those will be drawn with an underline. This will not intersect with the text of the header line.

Normally, underlines cut through letters that descend below the baseline, such as the letters g and y. We choose to avoid that because it makes for a cleaner interface (though I personally think it is not a good style for paragraph text, because of the rivers of negative space it introduces).

This specific design is available for Emacs version 29 or higher. Users of Emacs 28 must set x-underline-at-descent-line to a non-nil value. Though note that this has a global effect: we cannot limit it to a single face.

Thanks to Steven Allen for covering this in pull request 37: https://github.com/protesilaos/spacious-padding/pull/37. Steven has assigned copyright to the Free Software Foundation.

This is about the buttons we find in buffers of the Custom system. For example, we get such a buffer after we do M-x customize.

The relevant keyword is :custom-button-width. It is set to a number of spaces for padding. Here is the default value and, as always, the documentation cover the details:

(setq spacious-padding-widths
      '( :internal-border-width 15
         :header-line-width 4
         :mode-line-width 6
         :custom-button-width 3 ; the new one
         :tab-width 4
         :right-divider-width 30
         :scroll-bar-width 8
         :fringe-width 8))

There were reports about incorrect face specifications that could … …