Re: New start up splash screen annoyance...

[David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>]

storm@cua.dk (Kim F. Storm) writes:

> I still don't see why we cannot simply output a (possibly rather
> verbose) message in the echo area when emacs is started with a file
> name arg.  
>
> Such a message disappears automatically on the first key-press, so
> even though some users may still find it annoying, it doesn't get in
> the way of editing the file.

It would likely need to be somewhat more persistent: I know that
Debian Emacsen will usually output messages when loading additionally
installed Emacs packages which would likely clear out the echo area
message.  But maybe there is a point in the load order where we can
place the message in a manner where it will persist reasonably well.

In case this is not reliable, I had proposed two different ways of
working around this (which both more or less got lost in the heat).

a) use an idle hook (triggered on 5 seconds of idleness) that will
replace the echo area message with the pointer as long as fewer than
30 seconds have passed (that would presumably help against autoload
messages and/or garbage-collect messages and/or autosave messages).

b) put a tooltip overlay for 30 seconds over the whole buffer that
ends up being displayed, or something equivalent.

Tooltips are designed to be displayed in a manner that does not
obstruct editing, so it might make sense to use the user interface
intelligence (and developer fallout) that already went into promoting
information without annoyance.

In either case, we'll need a handy shortcut for the About screen
(which is not yet there), and f1 C-a seems reasonable.

So to get a reliable non-obtrusive pointer to the splash screen for
the case of starting with a filename, there is certainly some code to
be written and tested.  Discussing this proves to be hard at the
moment.

-- 
David Kastrup