Re: Menu help text not shown when using keyboard

[Lennart Borgman]

Jason Rumney wrote:

> "Richard M. Stallman" <address@hidden> writes:
>
>  
>
> >    If you are using the keyboard to navigate the menus then you currently 
> >    get no information about the help text that are associated with the menu 
> >    entries.
> >
> > Would you like to try to implement this?  I think you need to find the
> > right code in xmenu.c, and make it call show_help_echo.
> >    
>
> The menu selection code is called asynchronously (at least on
> Windows). So calling show_help_echo directly is not possible. You have
> to call kbd_buffer_store_help_event (frame, help), and somehow arrange
> for it to use the minibuffer rather than popping up a tooltip at the
> mouse position.
>  
Would the way to go be to change kbd_buffer_store_help_event to take new 
parameters? Then we could also arrange to get rid of the timeout for 
certain messages. For menu help text shown in the echo area I see no 
need for a timeout. It does not seem to behave that way in other 
applications and I think it could be rather confusing if it behaves 
differently in Emacs.

I also noticed a small bug. If the menu entry does not have a help text 
then the echo area is not cleared. Try for example "Emacs FAQ" in the 
help menu.

BTW: I always thinks it is difficult to understand in what thread some 
code is supposed to be run. Would it not be good with some notation in 
the comments for this? Or is there some simple way to get this 
information now?