Re: Proposed new core library: alert.el

[John Wiegley <jwiegley@gmail.com>]

>>>>> Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

> I think it would make sense to provide an intermediate platform-independent
> layer for displaying alerts, not unlike file-notify.el that conceals the
> supported back-ends behind a unified portable API. Then Emacs features could
> use this facility as part of their application code, knowing that the alert
> will be displayed on most or all of the supported platforms.

This is actually what alert.el was written to do. The various platform-
specific backends are separate from the notification engine, and could easily
be moved to their own files (and perhaps should be).

The default alert backend is 'message+log', which works everywhere, and adds
just a touch of extra functionality on top of the current `message'. For
example, you could filter on severity, choose to colorize messages from a
certain component, etc.

Another backend is 'fringe' (it colors the fringe, for example turning green
to indicate a successful M-x compile, or red to indicate a failing one). This
won't work in contexts without a fringe, but it's also not platform specific.

John