Re: Tweak to key-description for menu bindings

[David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>]

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

> David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org> writes:
>
>> storm@cua.dk (Kim F. Storm) writes:
>>
>>> It also improves handling of menu bar entries in two ways:
>>>
>>> 1) If menu-bar-mode is disabled, it doesn't mention menu bar bindings.
>>>
>>> 2) It pretty prints menu bar entries like this:
>>>     e.g. "File Menu" rather than "<menu-bar> <file> <new-file>"
>>
>> Uh, how is it an improvement to leave off the "New file" information
>> from the menu?
>
> I have been looking further into "menu binding pretty-printing",
> and I agree that my previous approach was too narrow-minded.
>
> I now have a solution where key-description produces a real human
> readable text for menu bindings.
>
> For example,
>
> (key-description [menu-bar file new-file])
>
> now prints
>
>  <menu-bar> <file> <new-file>
>
> whereas with my patch to key-description, it will print
>
>  File=>New File...
>
> New:
> Options=>Mule (Multilingual Environment)=>Set Coding Systems=>For Next Command
>
>
> Shall I install this?

My vote is "yes".  However, I would also want to suggest that such
pretty-printed key sequences can, as some sort of a general principle,
be passed to the kbd macro to make a target for define-key, so that
the developer can be spared having to switch on his brain as often as
possible.  I don't know how feasible this is as kbd is a macro, and
the lookup could depend on the keymaps currently active or something.

But since kbd is a macro, it could also return a substitution that
will do the lookup at runtime depending on the maps then current.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum