Re: Increasing the rate of modeline display

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> Date: Fri, 6 Mar 2015 08:20:41 -0300
> From: Artur Malabarba <bruce.connor.am@gmail.com>
> Cc: emacs-devel <emacs-devel@gnu.org>
> 
> > How can Emacs know that the value of the eval form changed?  It can't,
> > unless it actually eval's it, can it?
> 
> Yes, I understand why the default behavior is like that. I was
> wondering whether there was a simple way to change that temporarily
> (e.g. have the mode-line update at least once per second).

We could perhaps add a feature for this kind of applications, if it's
deemed important.  In general, there are options to inhibit redisplay
optimizations, but they are meant for debugging only, and so are
enabled only if you build with --enable-checking=glyphs.

> > You will see that 'display-time', which does similar things, uses a
> > timer, which changes the mode-line contents independently of Emacs
> > recomputing it.
> 
> Thanks for the pointer. I've now resigned to using timers as well
> (wasn't terrible, but about half the code is dedicated to that now
> =/).

Couldn't you just slightly customize display-time instead?  It can be
told to update once a second, perhaps even faster (I didn't try faster
than once a second, though).