Re[2]: Tooltipping enhancement request

["Eric M. Ludlam" <eric@siege-engine.com>]

>>> Masatake YAMATO <jet@gyve.org> seems to think that:
>> 2) A means for accepting input from a tooltip (a strange idea)
>>    or a way to make a regular Emacs frame look like a tooltip.
>> 
>> The tooltip is pretty good for me.  I don't use the mouse much, but I
>> watch others use this feature in other editors, and they all like to
>> go clicky-clicky on the completion list.  I think it would help
>> mouse-bound users.
>> 
>> The tooltip part is important because a timer can cause Emacs to go
>> into this completion mode.  Splitting windows and moving the mouse
>> makes the feature difficult to accept.
>> 
>
>What kind of input do you expect?
>
>About VisualBasic like completion selection, I think it is better 
>to extend the behavior of popup-menu. The popup menu of emacs configured
>with --with-gtk can do
>1) select a menu item with cursor keys, and
>2) pass other keys to the behind buffer and close the popup menu itself.
>
>The biggest problem is that there is no elisp function to pop down the 
>popup menu. (Correct me if I write wroing.) So you cannot use the popup
>menu with timers.
  [ ... ]

I'll call what I want a "completion tip" to separate it from both
tooltips which do their job just fine, and menus.

A usage of a completion tip be this:

1) popup from a timer or keypress, showing possible completions
2) accept any length text, and show a scrollbar if too long
3) remove itself in case of non-completion-tip actions.
4) not disappear on valid completion tip actions which include:
   a) scrollbar actions
   b) cursor up/down navigation
5) allow highlighting/coloring of one or more in the list

I think I can simulate a bunch of of this with tooltips and clever use
of text characters and images, but I'm not sure about the flashing of
the tip on each keystroke.

A problem with menus is that they won't go away after non completion
tip type actions.

Thanks
Eric

-- 
          Eric Ludlam:                 zappo@gnu.org, eric@siege-engine.com
   Home: http://www.ludlam.net            Siege: www.siege-engine.com
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