Re: erc-burnt-toast - Provide Windows Notification Center to erc with burnt-toast and erc-match

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Corwin Brust <corwin@bru.st>
> Date: Wed, 4 Mar 2020 16:09:52 -0600
> Cc: Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>, mab@gnu.org, Emacs developers <emacs-devel@gnu.org>
> 
> There is one feature I cannot see how to accomplish and I'm afraid I
> somewhat centered erc-burnt-toast around it.
> 
> Burnt-Toast calls this feature Shoulder Tap Notifications, but I'll
> tall them "STN", here.  I find this quite useful.  STN will fall back
> creating to creating normal toast/addition to stack/whatever is
> configured in WIndows.  When an extra argument "person" matches the
> Email address of a contact, and given that contact has been previously
> pinned to the task-bar, a second additional argument "image" can be
> displayed hovering over the deskop.
> 
> I use the app "Buttery Toast" to make my start menu and task-bar
> "extra hidden" (they did not show unless I press the "flag" key). In
> any case, I often have (several) apps full-screen.  So erc-burnt-toast
> makes a someone popup and dance over my full-screen Netflix when I get
> mentioned on IRC, and my friends all think I am cool, and that Emacs
> is cool, and so on.

Sorry, I don't think I understand what that means in practice.  Can
you describe in more detail what this "Shoulder Taps" feature does,
and perhaps show a few screenshots?  I know very little about the new
look-and-feel of Windows 10, and even less about all the new buzzwords
they added to describe those features.

Also, it is not yet clear to me what kind of information would you
like to show in these ERC notifications.  Can you post a more detailed
description, and perhaps also tell which features of D-Bus
notifications you think you may be lacking in w32-notification-notify?
(I've read the README on the erc-burnt-toast site, but I still have
the above questions largely unanswered, probably because I don't know
enough about the Windows 10 notifications.)

> WWYT of adding "SholderTaps"?  II haven't started looking at w32's
> source so not sure what technical options may exist.

AFAIU, this cannot be done in Emacs, because the underlying APIs are
for C# programs.  So if you want this, you will have to invoke
external programs (which will have to be written in C# or compatible
languages).  That said, w32-notification-notify supports displaying
images via the :icon parameter, so I'd suggest first to investigate
whether this could do at least some subset of what "shoulder taps" do.

There's one other aspect of this discussion that bothers me: it sounds
like erc-burnt-toast is for Windows only? and there's no direct
equivalent of that for GNU/Linux?  If that's so, I suggest first to
figure out how these notifications will look on GNU/Linux (or in
general any platform that fully supports D-Bus), and only then discuss
how to do something similar natively on Windows.  The erc-burnt-toast
package is out there, so people who want it can use it; but adding a
core feature to ERC which comes with Emacs must first implement this
on GNU systems, and we cannot, as a matter of policy, have significant
features that work only on non-free platforms, without any equivalents
on free ones.