Observations on the splash screen - and signal-process

Observations on the splash screen - and signal-process

[Kim F. Storm]

If auto-save files are found during startup, the splash screen says:

If an Emacs session crashed recently, type Meta-x recover-session RET
to recover the files you were editing.


Some comments on this:

1) Shouldn't "Meta-x" be "M-x" here ?

2) Couldn't we make this a "clickable" "Recover Session" button
   like the Open file... instead of the text?

3) Maybe rephrase it to something like:

One or more Emacs auto-save files exists; click [RECOVER] to review the
sessions and possibly recover the files you were editing at that time.

4) It was wrong...

Actually, I didn't have any crashed session - but I have another Emacs session
running which has created an auto save file.  

Maybe emacs should check the saved sessions and filter out the
currently running sessions ...  
A simple (signal-process PID 0) would suffice -- unfortunately, the
doc string for signal-process does not describe the return value
in this case (currently it is 0 if the process exists and -1 otherwise
- but better return values would probably be t or nil).

BTW, the elisp manual doesn't mention that the signal can be a symbol
as well as a number (signal names are portable, numbers are not!!)

Finally, wouldn't it make sense if (signal-process PID nil) checked for
the existense of process PID - using signal 0 is probably non-portable.

-- 
Kim F. Storm <storm@cua.dk> http://www.cua.dk

Re: Observations on the splash screen - and signal-process

[Juri Linkov]

> If auto-save files are found during startup, the splash screen says:
>
> If an Emacs session crashed recently, type Meta-x recover-session RET
> to recover the files you were editing.
>
> Some comments on this:
>
> 1) Shouldn't "Meta-x" be "M-x" here ?
>
> 2) Couldn't we make this a "clickable" "Recover Session" button
>    like the Open file... instead of the text?
>
> 3) Maybe rephrase it to something like:
>
> One or more Emacs auto-save files exists; click [RECOVER] to review the
> sessions and possibly recover the files you were editing at that time.
>
> 4) It was wrong...

5) Another drawback is that this message gives the false impression
that Emacs crashes often, so users might have doubts about Emacs stability.
Displaying it only after the real crash when Emacs has something to recover
will improve this.

-- 
Juri Linkov
http://www.jurta.org/emacs/