What's twiddle in emacs-goodies pacakage ?

What's twiddle in emacs-goodies pacakage ?

[chaouche yacine]

Hello,
My linux distribution comes with an emacs-goodies-el package. It lists twiddle as : "mode line hacks to keep you awake;" I tried M-x twiddle-start on the command line but I don't understand what this does. I am curious to know what's this for ? 


-- Yassine.

RE: What's twiddle in emacs-goodies pacakage ?

[Drew Adams]

> My linux distribution comes with an emacs-goodies-el package. It lists
> twiddle as : "mode line hacks to keep you awake;" I tried M-x twiddle-start
> on the command line but I don't understand what this does. I am curious to
> know what's this for ?

Are you awake now?  If so, it must be working.

(Sorry, bad joke.  I can't help with the real question.
Hopefully someone else can.)

Re: What's twiddle in emacs-goodies pacakage ?

[Michael Heerdegen]

chaouche yacine <yacinechaouche@yahoo.com> writes:

> Hello, My linux distribution comes with an emacs-goodies-el
> package. It lists twiddle as : "mode line hacks to keep you awake;" I
> tried M-x twiddle-start on the command line but I don't understand
> what this does. I am curious to know what's this for ?

In my version of emacs-goodies-el there is a bug in
`twiddle-frob-mode-line-format'.  When I evaluate

#+begin_src emacs-lisp
(defun twiddle-frob-mode-line-format ()
  (let* ((format (default-value 'mode-line-format))
         ;; XEmacs 19.14 has "-%-" as the last elt by default.
         (end (or (member "%-" format)
                  (member "-%-" format))))
    (cond (end
           (setcdr end (cons (car end) (cdr end)))
           (setcar end 'twiddle-mode-string))
          (t (nconc format '(twiddle-mode-string))))))
#+end_src

(I changed the last line) after loading the package and hit M-x
twiddle-start, at least something happens, where "something" is
different from "nothing" after all (I get a spinning bar in the
mode-line).

I guess this package is not so super useful for interactive usage.


Michael.

Re: What's twiddle in emacs-goodies pacakage ?

[Glenn Morris]

As a not very helpful comment, I'll say that IMO the Debian
emacs-goodies package is mainly just a collection of very old stuff,
much of which may not work any more. Unless you know that you actually
need it, I would just apt-get purge it, because all it's likely to do is
complicate upgrades of the installed Emacs package (due to the way
Debian handles that). Ref eg this 4 year old report

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=705059

Re: What's twiddle in emacs-goodies pacakage ?

[chaouche yacine]

Thanks, everybody. I don't know what I was expecting...
-- Yassine.