Markus.Grunwald(a)pruftechnik.com writes: It would first require a tolerably working balloon help. -- David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum

"Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen(a)xemacs.org&gt; writes: "Does not get in the way", "does not carry full Window decorations", "disappears immediately when typing or moving the mouse without blocking" "pops up without taking CPU time to prepare, thus causing an inexplicable delay in normal operations before the reason is apparent", "does not cause the Windows port to crash". Stuff like that. Basically putting it into a state where it is more than of academic interest. Where people would enable it for actual work rather than a demonstration. The preview-latex FAQ states: ＠subsection Why don't I get balloon help like in the screen shots? Some users have reported problems with their XEmacs version, so balloon help is no longer switched on by default. Use the Preview/Customize menu or ＠kbd{＠key{M-x} customize-variable} in order to customize ＠code{preview-use-balloon-help} to `On'. This only concerns XEmacs: tooltips under ＠w{GNU Emacs} are enabled by default and unproblematic. In fact, the previous FAQ entry before we changed the default was quite less complimentary. "Tolerably working" in my book would imply that there is no reason not to turn it on by default in XEmacs as distributed. If you think this is already the case, then enable balloon-help-mode by default. tooltip-mode is the default in Emacs, and nobody complains about them (well, after a recent discussion, tooltips for submenus were removed since they tend to obscure the subwindows, but that is more or less a minor detail, and anyway XEmacs does not even have menu tooltips altogether). -- David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum

David> "Does not get in the way", Which means what? If you pop up a balloon help in the center of a rectangle, you will obscure some of it. Which area should we avoid getting in the way of, and how are we supposed to know? Or does this only apply in cases like popup menus, where there's an obvious region that should not be obscured? David> "does not carry full Window decorations", Fixed in May 2005. David> "disappears immediately when typing or moving the mouse David> without blocking" Easy enough to implement from balloon-help primitives, I should think, but I haven't actually done it yet. I don't recall this being reported as an issue before. David> "pops up without taking CPU time to prepare, thus causing David> an inexplicable delay in normal operations before the David> reason is apparent", What do you mean by "normal operations"? If you turn balloon-help on, it does not interfere with clicking toolbar buttons immediately although the toolbar will provide help if you do nothing for quite some time. Isn't that normal operation? Have you tried setting `balloon-help-timeout' to something other than the (rather high) default of 1500 (milliseconds)? I cannot perceive any delay at all with it set to 50. (0 doesn't work right because of weirdness, a bug if you like, in the timer code.) David> "does not cause the Windows port to crash". Don't recall hearing of that before, either. :-( You wouldn't happen to be able to point to a debugger stack trace, would you? -- School of Systems and Information Engineering http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp University of Tsukuba Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN Ask not how you can "do" free software business; ask what your business can "do for" free software.

"Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen(a)xemacs.org&gt; writes: David> "does not cause the Windows port to crash". David> At the danger of repeating myself: I don't use XEmacs, and David> I don't use Windows. And if at a customer site an editing David> system happens to crash, I won't start compiling and David> debugging stuff there. By my count, that's 3 of 5 bugs we can close or shelve: two bugs solved in my last post, this one unfixable in any reasonable horizon due to lack of user cooperation. Continuing the count-down, I wrote that it should be easy to solve the pop-down-on-event issue. Turns out it's half-solved already---any command will pop down the help. I also know how to get it to pop down on motion or a non-command keystroke, but I don't know if that's desirable in all cases---I'd like to keep the option open, but how to handle that will depend on the different use cases. So that's 3.75 out of 5 bugs that we can close, simply on the basis of getting you to rant a little more specificly. Please give me the other specifications I requested, so that we can close the "gets in the way" bug. With 4.75 out of 5 bugs closed, you can reenable balloon-help, and we can start on the process of making it work more than merely "acceptably well" for AUCTeX. How about that, David? -- School of Systems and Information Engineering http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp University of Tsukuba Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN Ask not how you can "do" free software business; ask what your business can "do for" free software.

David> and you'll have preview-latex users at least as a test David> audience. And the problem reports will wind up at your own David> door. They never have ended up at XEmacs in the past. Do you have a reason to suppose that will change now? David> Enabling it in AUCTeX by default will, even if I take your David> word as gospel, cause trouble for all users with older David> versions, presumably also XEmacs 21.4. Nobody has yet suggested that. There are still 1.25 bugs outstanding, which I for one would like to try to fix, or at least make less annoying, before changing defaults anywhere. By the way, balloon-help is a packaged library; none of the fixes require changes to XEmacs core.[1] All users of XEmacs 21.x (x >= 1) need to do is update to the improved version of the edit-utils package once it is released. Footnotes: [1] Of course fixing a crash does, but without a stack trace, there will be no fix in the short run. -- School of Systems and Information Engineering http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp University of Tsukuba Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN Ask not how you can "do" free software business; ask what your business can "do for" free software.

Just for fun I tried turning on balloon-help-mode in 21.4.19 native Windows, and whilst it's decidely sub-optimal [1], I haven't gotten it to crash yet. I'll leave it on for a while and see what happens. Robert [1] It creates an invisible dummy frame to act as the parent of the ballon-help window, however that frame does not stay invisible, nor can it be deleted. Oh, and the window containing the text is too small, maybe by 1 character.