Re: "Loading"

[Ted Zlatanov]

On Thu, 15 Mar 2012 17:12:10 +0100 Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <address@hidden> 
wrote: 

LMI> Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <address@hidden> writes:
>> If we have a global spinner, all that would convey to the user is that
>> Emacs is doing something...  somewhere...  for some reason...

LMI> On the other hand, if the interface allowed mouse-over over the spinner
LMI> to display a text saying what it was doing, then that might be nice.
LMI> Even for a per-buffer spinner.

A spinner is just one instance of a progress reporter (indeterminate) so
we should aim to implement a general progress reporter.

I am in favor of both a per-buffer reporter in the modeline, and a
global progress indicator.  Both should use the "Harvey balls" Unicode
characters, if they are available, rather than the typical \|/-
characters, and it could even use SVG if that's available.  On mouseover
this special progress report indicator it would display the messages
currently littering the echo area.

It should all be passed in parameters to `make-progress-reporter' with
the defaults left the way they are now.

We discussed this a while ago and Michael had a proposal with working
code that used the current modeline IIRC.  The global progress indicator
could live in the menu bar or in the currently active modeline.  I feel
that providing a flexible interface we can use and experiment on is more
important than getting every possible case right from the start, so
please think of flexible approaches rather than exactly how it should be
done to please everyone.

Ted