30.6 Common Gutter Widgets

A gutter can contain arbitrary text. So, for example, in an Info buffer you could put the title of the current node in the top gutter, and it would not scroll out of view in a long node. (This is an artificial example, since usually the node name is sufficiently descriptive, and Info puts that in the mode line.)

A more common use for the gutter is to hold some kind of active widget. The buffer-tab facility, available in all SXEmacs frames, creates an array of file-folder-like tabs, which the user can click with the mouse to switch buffers. W3 uses a progress-bar widget in the bottom gutter to give a visual indication of the progress of time-consuming operations like downloading.