Re: tooltips for minor modes

[Dan Nicolaescu <dann@ics.uci.edu>]

"Drew Adams" <drew.adams@oracle.com> writes:

  > >     It would be nice if the mode-line :lighter for minor 
  > >     modes would have a
  > >     tooltip with a brief description of what the minor mode is.
  > > 
  > > I think it is a good idea.  We could perhaps establish a convention
  > > that a certain part of the doc string of the minor mode function is
  > > used for this.  Or, if that would require changing too many doc
  > > strings, we could have some other way to specify the string for this.

One possibility would be to use the first line of the doc-string. But a
quick "grep --after=1 define-minor-mode" shows that for quite a lot of
minor modes the first line of the doc-string gives not useful
information:

scroll-all.el:106:(define-minor-mode scroll-all-mode
scroll-all.el-107-  "Toggle Scroll-All minor mode.

So doing either the above or the proposal below requires some editing.

  > Perhaps add a :help keyword to `define-minor-mode' etc.?

Sounds good, and consistent with other uses for :help. Where would that
:help property be stored?

Drew, given that you are you touched this minor-mode stuff most
recently, do you want to implement one of these ?