Re: Idleness

[Harald Meland <Harald.Meland@usit.uio.no>]

[Hrvoje Niksic]

| I see the difference now; thanks for the explanation.  But I must be
| still missing something, because I don't yet understand why Gnus needs
| the hack.  The FSFmacs `run-with-idle-timer' should behave as desired
| when the REPEAT argument is nil:
| 
|     run-with-idle-timer is an interactive autoloaded Lisp function in `timer'.
| 
|     Perform an action the next time Emacs is idle for SECS seconds.
|     If REPEAT is non-nil, do this each time Emacs is idle for SECS seconds.

Read the documentation carefully.  I did earlier today, and discovered
that a non-nil REPEAT means that

	* the function will get run every time Emacs has gone from a
	non-idle state and remained in an idle state for SECS seconds,

whereas a nil REPEAT would imply that

	* the function is only called the very first time that Emacs
	goes from non-idle and stays idle for SECS seconds (i.e. the
	actual timer could very well be removed as soon as the
	function has been called (In fact, that may be the way it does
	work -- I haven't checked)).


That being said, if you think that

	* adding a repeating non-idle timer from the idle-timer
	function,
and
	* making sure the repeating non-idle timer gets removed as
	soon as Emacs becomes un-idle again

isn't a hack -- well, then we obviously have a different view of what
kind of code would make a hack :)
-- 
Harald