Re: Reducing mouse-dependency In Emacs.

[Luc Teirlinck <teirllm@dms.auburn.edu>]

Eli Zaretskii wrote:

   Rather than introducing new properties, I'd think it's better to have
   an option to display the text defined thru mouse-face and help-echo
   when point is anywhere inside the text covered by those properties.

That might be another thing that could be done.  However, it would
seem that even if that were implemented, we still would need a
function of the type `print-local-help', which could indeed be a lot
shorter without the additional properties.  The person who first
complained about this (T. V. Raman) very explicitly did not want
automatic display of the type you suggest:

   Would be a nice means to exploit some of the newer features of emacs
    ---as an example, balloon help in itself may not be 
   directly useful to the emacspeak user --- you really dont want emacs
   intrrupting what you're listening to and tell you things --makes it
   too much like the dreaded office-clip from idiot-proven interfaces. On
   the other hand it would be nice to ask for a tooltip.

The new text properties and the way to make them accessible are two
separate issues.  The new properties would just provide some extra
flexibility.  `short-help' would default to `help-echo' and would just
be used if the author thought that whether the user is currently using
the mouse or the keyboard makes a difference. `long-help' just
provides a way to provide more elaborate help.  In as far as
`long-help' is concerned, that was inspired by another thread on
`bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org'.  Quoting Peter Seibel:

    Anyway, I noticed this problem because I was trying to use RET to
    enter a new line in the middle of a longish list (like the value of
    load-path) that I had just dumped into my *scratch* buffer to see what
    the heck it was and was pretty confused at what the heck was going on
    since the binding didn't show up in the mode documentation (nor, as it
    turns out, in the output of describe-bindings) I eventually figured
    out from experiments with C-h k more or less what was going on.

Meant is the rebinding of RET (and mouse-2) in C-j output in Lisp
interaction mode.

So I thought that it might be good to be able to provide people with
more elaborate information if they are confused, with links to other
places, printed out keymaps and such.  Maybe also information on how
to customize or disable the feature if they are not happy with it.

For this type of situation, optional automatic highlighting and display
(of short `help-echo' type text) on "point-over" might indeed be a
nice additional feature.  Maybe `describe-bindings' could also list
text and overlay property keymaps, that could also help.

Sincerely,

Luc.