Protesilaos Stavrou

Emacs: spacious-padding version 0.4.0

This package provides a global minor mode to increase the spacing/padding of Emacs windows and frames. The idea is to make editing and reading feel more comfortable. Enable the mode with M-x spacious-padding-mode. Adjust the exact spacing values by modifying the user option spacious-padding-widths.

Inspiration for this package comes from Nicolas Rougier’s impressive designs and Daniel Mendler’s org-modern package.

Release notes below.

This version add some quality-of-life improvements to an already solid package.

The vertical border can now remain visible

The user option spacious-padding-widths is the single point of entry for all types of padding supported by the package. The property :right-divider-width applies to the vertical border between windows. When it is set to 1 pixel in width, it is no longer made invisible. Higher values do make it invisible, to produce the padding effect.

Spacing between windows can still be increased by modifying the now-supported fringes (more below, including a code sample).

Thanks to Aronne Raimondi for suggesting the possibility of a visible divider. This was done via a private channel and the information is shared with permission.

Add padding to the window fringes

The fringe area is the space to the left and right side of every window where indicators such as for line continuation/truncation are displayed. The user option spacious-padding-widths can now be configured to either (i) apply the same width to both fringes, per the :fringe-width property, or (ii) set different width values for either side with :right-fringe-width and :left-fringe-width.

The default value is 8, which the standard width of fringes. This means that there is no visible change for users unless they opt to modify the relevant value.

Sample using the default:

(setq spacious-padding-widths
      '( :internal-border-width 15
         :header-line-width 4
         :mode-line-width 6
         :tab-width 4
         :right-divider-width 30
         :fringe-width 20 ; Make both fringes 20 pixels wide
         :scroll-bar-width 8))

Or this for individuated values:

(setq spacious-padding-widths
      '( :internal-border-width 15
         :header-line-width 4
         :mode-line-width 6
         :tab-width 4
         :right-divider-width 30
         :right-fringe-width 20 ; Make the right fringe 20 pixels wide
         :left-fringe-width 8 ; Make the left fringe 8 pixels wide
         :scroll-bar-width 8))

When combined with the aforementioned setting to keep the window divider visible, we can have something like this:

(setq spacious-padding-widths
      '( :internal-border-width 15
         :header-line-width 4
         :mode-line-width 6
         :tab-width 4
         :right-divider-width 1 ; Keep a visible vertical line between windows
         :fringe-width 20 ; Make both fringes 20 pixels wide
         :scroll-bar-width 8))

The built-in tab-line-mode is also covered

Previous versions of the package provided stylistic support for tab-bar-mode. This is now extended to tab-line-mode. Thanks to Lucas Gruss for providing the impetus for this inclusion in pull request 6: https://github.com/protesilaos/spacious-padding/pull/6.

Building on that, all tabbed interfaces are subject to the property :tab-width of the spaicous-padding-widths. A granular configuration is also possible with the :tab-bar-width and :tab-line-width.

Thanks again to Lucas Gruss for suggesting this arrangement. We discussed this as a follow-up to Lucas’ contribution in commit 1bbc076. The discussion took place in the context of pull request 6: https://github.com/protesilaos/spacious-padding/pull/6.

Using the default value of spaicous-padding-widths as a starting point, we can thus have the following:

(setq spacious-padding-widths
      '( :internal-border-width 15
         :header-line-width 4
         :mode-line-width 6
         :tab-width 4 ; `tab-bar-mode' and `tab-line-mode' are uniform
         :right-divider-width 30
         :scroll-bar-width 8
         :fringe-width 8))

Or this:

(setq spacious-padding-widths
      '( :internal-border-width 15
         :header-line-width 4
         :mode-line-width 6
         :tab-bar-width 4 ; `tab-bar-mode' has a padding of 4 pixels
         :tab-line-width 2 ; `tab-line-mode' has a padding of 2 pixels
         :right-divider-width 30
         :scroll-bar-width 8
         :fringe-width 8))

No more SourceHut

Development continues on GitHub with GitLab as a mirror.

I explained my reasons here: https://protesilaos.com/codelog/2024-01-27-sourcehut-no-more/.

This is a change that affects all my Emacs packages.

Miscellaneous

  • The properties of the user option spacious-padding-widths accept a nil value when configured via the Custom user interface, customize-set-variable, setopt, or related.

  • The vertical-border face is explicitly supported. This ensures that colours are the way we need them to be.

  • The manual reflects all of the above.

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