Re: signal handling bogosities

[Miles Bader <miles@gnu.org>]

On Sat, Dec 21, 2002 at 03:26:32PM -0500, Richard Stallman wrote:
>     In fact I find it confusing (as a user) that it updates mouse-faces
>     almost always, but most things only when it's `ready'.
> 
> Emacs won't let you *change* text in the buffer until it is `ready',
> and of course they don't update until they change.  By contrast, the
> locus of mouse highlighting does change, whenever you move the mouse.

I'm sure there's a way you can think of it so that it `makes sense'
(and of course I understand technically why it happens the way it does).

None-the-less, I really do find it confusing in practice because seeing the
buffer contents apparently change makes it _feel_ like emacs is ready do so
something (even though it's not), and I'm subsequently surprised when I
try to do something else and can't.

Consider another apparently similar case:  In X (unlike some other window
systems), you can move, resize, and iconify windows even when the underlying
applications aren't ready to respond (and so can't redraw).  In contrast with
emacs mouse-faces, this _feels_ right to me.

I guess the only way I can explain the difference is that in X the window
frame title bar visually appear to be a `wrapper,' and I can easily think of
them as being a completely separate layer and thus follow different rules of
interaction.  In emacs, mouse highlighting is visually part of the buffer
contents, and so it's harder to think it as being somehow separate.
[However, I think it _would_ seem natural if one could move emacs-window
boundaries without being to actually interact with the buffer, because
they're visually distinct layers]

Anyway, those are my thoughts.

-Miles

-- 
`The suburb is an obsolete and contradictory form of human settlement'