Stephen J Turnbull <turnbull(a)sk.tsukuba.ac.jp&gt; writes in xemacs-beta(a)xemacs.org: ... Balloon help is not necessarily going to be available. I would consider putting it in the echo area instead, as we already do this for several other mode-line fields. My first thought is "don't do this", but I don't feel strongly one way or another. There are two versions of this file, mule-test.el is the other one, I believe. One of them was recently updated, so make a quick check first to see whether or not the stuff you're trying to update has already been updated or not.