bug#1305: All code that currently beeps should use visual bell instead

[Stefan Kangas]

Lars Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org> writes:

> Stefan Kangas <stefan@marxist.se> writes:
>
>> I'm personally fine with that, but I suspect it would be controversial
>> as it would leave us with no way of beeping (visual or otherwise).
>
> You get a message in the echo area...

Not for `ding' though, e.g.:

    (progn
      (setq ring-bell-function #'ignore)
      (defun foo () (interactive) (ding)))

    M-x foo RET

So if we make that change, perhaps we should make `ding' obsolete in
favour of `user-error'.

> As somebody else noted earlier, if you have visible-bell on, but use
> "-nw", that's the only notification you get -- there's no visible bell
> on the console.  So you could say that there's some precedence for using
> just the echo area as the only notification mechanism (beyond apparently
> all the popular Emacs distributions doing exactly that).

True.  You have my vote, FWIW.