Re: Reducing mouse-dependency In Emacs.

[Nick Roberts <nick@nick.uklinux.net>]

Luc Teirlinck writes:
 > 
 > Miles Bader wrote:
 > 
 >    Luc Teirlinck <teirllm@dms.auburn.edu> writes:
 >    > To take care of functional values, I need not only the value of the
 >    > property but also need to know whether it was found in an overlay (and
 >    > if so which overlay) or as a text property.
 > 
 >    How come?
 > 
 > Because:
 > 
 >      If the value of the `help-echo' property is a function, that
 >      function is called with three arguments, WINDOW, OBJECT and
 >      POSITION and should return a help string or NIL for none.  The
 >      first argument, WINDOW is the window in which the help was found.
 >      The second, OBJECT, is the buffer, overlay or string which had
 >      the
 >      `help-echo' property.  The POSITION argument is as follows...

I must admit I've lost the plot but it seems to have got far too complicated.

I agree with Miles, I don't think that you need to know all these
things.  I think that Emacs *provides* the appropriate arguments depending on
the context, which can then used in the function that evaluates to a string.

I'm always in favour of re-use to keep things simple and, IMO, `customize'
works well with and without the mouse. Here, a tooltip is displayed if the
mouse is placed over a widget. In the mouseless scenario, the help is
displayed in the echo area. However, this doesn't happen when point is over a
widget but when the user types <tab> (widget-forward) or <S-tab>
(widget-backward). This is less distracting and fits well with earlier
comments about emacspeak. Could you not do something similar with
next-help-echo-region and previous-help-echo-region?


Nick