Re: XEmacs opinion for preview-latex required...
Steve Youngs <steve(a)sxemacs.org> writes:
* David Kastrup <dak(a)gnu.org> writes:
> preview-latex contains in its mode setup
> (and preview-use-balloon-help
> (not (and (boundp 'balloon-help-mode)
> balloon-help-mode))
> (balloon-help-minor-mode 1))
> and preview-use-balloon-help defaults to t.
> On the other hand, we have received several complaints about the
> balloon-help-mode which seemingly results from this mode being
> not so very "native". The consequences are that the windows
> that pop up are fully decorated and tend to interfere with the
> focus.
The frame decoration is the responsibility of the window manager,
not XEmacs.
Care to explain then why the tooltips of Emacs and pretty much every
other application are, in contrast, completely undecorated (they _are_
in a separate window as can be seen when triggering one at the edge of
the frame)?
As for the focus, you are probably going to run into trouble if you
have something like a "focus follows mouse" strategy in your WM.
This problem is sometimes made worse by users who believe that if
they ever take their hand off the rat, it'll somehow stop working.
It seems that there is a way to ask for undecorated focus-less windows
under X, and other applications manage to get them. I seem to
remember vaguely that somebody once told me the balloon-help-mode
might be sort of a proof-of-concept code, showing that the XEmacs
frame/window/display model was so versatile that you could code
functionality like that completely using Elisp instead of requiring
more low-level stuff, or code it completely using the GUI abstraction
model of XEmacs so that no platform-specific code for X/Windows/MacOS
was needed. Whatever.
The question was not why it is impossible to get any better behavior
for balloon-help-mode and why every other application that manages
doing so is non-existent.
The question was whether there exist suggestions or conventions or
experiences about whether modes supporting balloon help should
actively enable the help or leave the fingers off it until the user
explicitly requests it.
It would appear that we might cause fewer problems in the long run for
users if we just keep our finger off it by default, since it does not
seem to be much part of the XEmacs mindshare.
--
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum