Re: What happened to the key-menu patch?

[Miles Bader <miles@lsi.nec.co.jp>]

storm@cua.dk (Kim F. Storm) writes:
> What happened to this patch?
> 
> There was some discussion how to accomplish this in a more general way
> such as adding dobinding/map-keymap to be able to do more of the
> function in Lisp, rather than in C (modifying the C-level code to use
> Fmap_keymap as well).

I intend to do this (move the keymap interpretation into lisp), but
haven't got around to it yet.

I guess we should add a `map-keymap' for xemacs compatibility; I'm not
sure if it's worth it to add a `dobindings' macro or not.

Also, the xemacs docstring for `map-keymap' says:

   `map-keymap' is a built-in function
   (map-keymap FUNCTION KEYMAP &optional SORT-FIRST)
   Apply FUNCTION to each element of KEYMAP.  FUNCTION will be called
   with two arguments: a key-description list, and the binding.
   ...etc...

There are a few things I'm not sure about:

 (1) The xemacs manual doesn't seem to explain very well what `a
     key-description list' is, but it's something like (meta control x).
     I guess this is a canonical format for key names in xemacs, but it
     doesn't appear to be so in emacs, so I'm not sure how that argument
     should be handled (perhaps just punt, and pass whatever's stored in
     the keymap).

 (2) How are menu entries handled with this?  I'm not sure whether xemacs
     even stores menus in keymaps or not (it's somewhat hard to tell,
     since keyaps are an opaque type in xemacs, and just calling
     map-keymap doesn't yield anything obvious).  We could just pass the
     whole menu entry (e.g., (menu-item ...)) as the first argument, and
     perhaps extract the binding and pass it as the second arg, or even
     pass something else for that.

> Also, there was some discussion on improving the actual prompting,
> but none of the alleged problems made have been bothering me [after all,
> those key menus are not used very often].

Which problems?  I have a newer patch (at least I hope I still have it;
I'm at work now) that fixed some of the issues like menus bigger than
the maximum minibuffer size, but they're probably not things that would
affect the usual case (unless you're Stephan).

The other issue was that of a delay for menu popup, which you didn't
like, but I feel strongly should be supported, since I don't like the
current `eager' display (though the delay could be 0 by default if
that's better for newbies).

-Miles
-- 
"Most attacks seem to take place at night, during a rainstorm, uphill,
 where four map sheets join."   -- Anon. British Officer in WW I