Re: Global indicators

[Chong Yidong <cyd@stupidchicken.com>]

Julien Danjou <julien@danjou.info> writes:

>> Global indicators, especially transient ones, ought to use the echo
>> area.
>
> This is a more general problem. There's no space for global indicator in
> Emacs, e.g. display-time, erc-track etc "abuses" mode-line because they
> have no other choice. Using the echo area which is transient does not
> seems like the right thing to do.
>
> Unless somone add a non transient part to it. That would be awesome.
>
>> If that's too hard, how about reserving the first character in the echo
>> area for a spinner instead?
>
> Why not rather a full part of the echo area for all the global
> indicators that should be there rather than in the mode-line?

I think this is a good idea.  How about putting such indicators on the
right-hand side of the echo area, justified to the right?  We could give
it a slightly less prominent face to distinguish it from ordinary echo
area messages.

One I can think of is that it might get confusing if echo area messages
start to overlap the indicator area (especially multi-line messages).
And how this would interact with the minibuffer is not clear.


One more thing: we could put a GTK spinner object (GtkSpinner) on the
right edge of the GTK tool bar.  I haven't looked into the details, but
the required code changes probably won't be too challenging.