Re: Increasing the rate of modeline display

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> Date: Thu, 5 Mar 2015 17:24:56 -0300
> From: Artur Malabarba <bruce.connor.am@gmail.com>
> 
> Is there a way to (temporarily) increase the rate at which the mode line is
> redisplayed? 
> 
> I was trying to write a package that adds a spinner to the mode line (to
> indicate ongoing operations), but I hit a wall because the mode line sometimes
> takes many seconds to redisplay.

You cannot increase the rate of redisplay, because it is already "as
fast as possible": Emacs enters redisplay whenever the Lisp
interpreter has nothing else to do.  There are no Emacs-induced delays
that you could slash, AFAIK.

In particular, any time the mode line changes it will be redisplayed
immediately when Emacs has a chance to do so.  "Takes many seconds"
sounds like something I never saw, except when some Lisp code is
running during that time.

If you have Lisp code running and want to initiate redisplay while
Lisp is still running, then yes, it could be a bit tricky.  But it
isn't clear to me that this is your case, especially as you are
talking about "rate".

So I guess you aren't telling us something important that prevents
redisplay from kicking in in your case.  Please add details, or post a
simple self-contained example of the problem.