Audio Feedback in Flymake: Easily Extending Flymake Itself

Audio Feedback in Flymake: Easily Extending Flymake Itself

[Veli-Pekka Tätilä]

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Hi,
Simply put, can I tell Flymake to produce sound when a new error is 
"created" or an existing one fixed? Visually, flymake uses a different 
background color to indicate line statuses and posts the error and warnings 
counts, I think, to the mode line. However, neither is particularly easy to 
read out smartly with a Windows screen reader from Emacs, who just sees a 
large "console", so I'd like to get audio feedback in stead. I'm using 
flymake_lua from:

http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/FlymakeLua

Playing the sound as such

http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/elisp/html_node/Sound-Output.html

or posting a message containing a bell to the message line monitored by the 
screen reader

http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/emacs-lisp-intro/html_node/message.html

seems easy enough.

I've taken a quick look at the list of functions in flymake but didn't find 
hooks to add there. Nor did I find anything I could directly extend, in the 
Lua specific bits. I'm rather new to Elisp but have read the gist of 
Programming in Emacs Lisp.

On a side note, flymake is one of the many things that made me go wow when I 
saw it in Emacs. Others, that I'm also using in Lua, include 
outline-minor-mode matching functions, incremental regexp searches, the Lua 
mode itself (due to the indents I do with C-i), not to mention dynamic 
abbreviation  bound to the tab key, for locals and function names. Great 
features that go well together in coding.

Any help appreciated.

-- 
With kind regards Veli-Pekka Tätilä
Accessibility, Apps and Coding plus Synths and Music:
http://vtatila.kapsi.fi 

Re: Audio Feedback in Flymake: Easily Extending Flymake Itself

[Veli-Pekka Tätilä]

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Hi list,
Once again, I did some basic learning on my own, and was able to come up 
with a passable solution, TIMTOWTDI. Probably far from idiomatic, but it 
gets the job done in my basic testing.

I looked at the flymake code, finding the flymake-report-status function 
called with the error and warnings count string, formatted like "%d/%d". 
Looking at the calls to that function, the only one having a non-empty error 
string is the one that posts the updated error and warnings counts on the 
mode line. In case of no errors or no warnings, it does not post 0/0.

Here's what I added in my .emacs file:

(defadvice
   flymake-report-status
   (before beep-on-flymake-failure (e-w &optional status) activate)

  "Play not_ok.wav in ~/emacs if we have a non-empty error count string."
   (if (and e-w (>  (length e-w) 0 ) )
      (play-sound-file "~/emacs/not_ok.wav")
   ) ; if
) ; advice

The ending comments make it easier to mentally track the parens, with a 
screen reader.

I have also realized that playing another wav in the else case is a bad idea 
as every succesful syntax check would beep reassuringly. That's far too 
often to be gratifying, <smile>. Plus the sounds play synchronously, on 
Win32 at least, ouch, so I'm keeping things brief. As in my OS sound scheme, 
the error is a 40 ms quiet burst of pinkish noise.

On a side note, Is there an easy way to only get the syntax chekc after a 
time out, on leaving the current line? OFten I leave the cursor on what I'm 
editing and start thinking, yet my statement may well be in a syntactically 
incorrect state at that point. I don't always hit C-j at the ends of lines, 
either, if I'm editing an existing statement in stead.

Hope this helps somebody else some day, too.

-- 
With kind regards Veli-Pekka Tätilä
Accessibility, Apps and Coding plus Synths and Music:
http://vtatila.kapsi.fi