Re: Add function to make frame topmost?

[David De La Harpe Golden]

Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
> Jan Djärv writes:
>  > Lennart Borgman skrev 2010-05-02 00.44:
>  > 
>  > > I think this is useful for reminders/appointments, log tail buffers etc.
>  > 
>  > I don't get it.
>
> "Programmer knows best."  Why users put up with it, I don't know.
>
>  > For reminders I'd rather see the kind of windows gnome uses for this, see 
>  > screen shot.  They are indeed topmost, but not transient for.
>
> That's a pretty good try, but it's still more obtrusive than it need
> be.  Why a close box?  *Any* click it such a window should dismiss it.

FWIW, on my system, notifications popups via libnotify [1] have close 
buttons but they're cosmetic/affordances, clicking on them anywhere 
dismisses them. Using libnotify means the desktop environment's uniform 
notifications are used. I use XFCE, their appearance and behaviour is 
configured via xfce4-notifyd-config, which allows changing graphical 
theme, position, timeout and opacity of them. (I found a tip on the arch 
linux wiki saying gnome users can edit the registry^Wgconf key 
/apps/notification-daemon/ to configure them on GNOME)

Try the following from the shell:

aptitude install libnotify-bin
notify-send  "Hello, World" "<b>I am a Fish.</b> On $(date)"

Results shown in the attached screenshot.

Linking emacs, at least x11/gtk emacs, against libnotify and supporting 
a (notify-send ...) or something usable from within emacs would probably 
be quite doable. Maybe the elisp api could be wrapped around the other 
platforms' native similar facilities on non-x11.

This approach wouldn't allow the notification popup to be an emacs frame 
with arbitrary contents, obviously you're limited to what the 
notification kinda-sorta-spec allows.

[1]
A bit different and more complex than the systray spec balloon message 
api I previously mentioned, allowing fancier notifications.

http://www.galago-project.org/docs/index.php
http://www.galago-project.org/specs/notification/0.9/index.html
http://manishtech.wordpress.com/2009/03/29/working-with-libnotify/