Re: Reducing mouse-dependency In Emacs.

[Luc Teirlinck <teirllm@dms.auburn.edu>]

Nick Roberts wrote:

   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.

If you, or anybody else, can point me to an existing Lisp function or
any other way that Emacs already "provides" these arguments in Lisp
and without mouse-over, I obviously will use it (and then everything I
write below can just be ignored).  I could not find any, but I did not
read through the entire Emacs Lisp code.

I do not even really believe that Miles was necessarily arguing
against my proposed new primitive (he can tell), I believe he was just
asking me for information.

   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.

Did you check in detail how Custom manages to print the help-echo in
the echo area?  If I understood correctly (it does not at all seem
that "simple" to me), it apparently uses two extra text properties it
manages itself, `button' and `field', depending on the situation, to
store and recover the information.

I propose to use one extremely simple and short C function and one
very simple and short Lisp function, compared to the entire machinery
used by Custom, and it would work in a way more general situation.  In
my situation, I can not do what Custom does, because I do not have the
information stored in `button' and `field' properties.

Sincerely,

Luc.