Thanks Paul and Andy for your hints. But anyway, I think the current XEmacs-21.4.5 behaviour is buggy. Since I want to send Eric a patch for speedbar (and this shouldn't include temporarily necessary bug workarounds), I want to know how to make a gutter-less speedbar frame assuming a bug-free gutter display, i.e., I want to make sure that the buggy behaviour is a bug in the implementation and not the specification ;-) I think the visibility of the gutter should be controlled the same way as the visibility of the toolbar, and indeed, there are the 5 corresponding specifiers for this {default,left,right,top,bottom}-XXX-visible-p. But unfortunately, I cannot produce a gutter-free speedbar with speedbar-frame-plist containing `default-gutter-visible-p nil' (as I can produce a toolbar-less speedbar containing `default-toolbar-visible-p nil'). Adding this produces a behaviour which is even stranger than I wrote in my first mail: 1. First, this will result in a speedbar not containing the buffer tabs but reserving space for the gutter. 2. If I also add `top-gutter-visible-p nil' to speedbar-frame-plist, I get the behaviour described in my first mail: no gutter (no space) but only if the buffer where speedbar is invoked from is active; in others, I see the buffer tabs. 3. If I close the speedbar, delete `top-gutter-visible-p nil' from speedbar-frame-plist, I still have the behaviour described in 2. - Christoph