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From: roland@AI.MIT.EDU (Roland McGrath)
Newsgroups: gnu.emacs.help,comp.emacs
Subject: Re: command idea
Message-ID: <9011100445.AA02007@albert.ai.mit.edu>
Date: 10 Nov 90 04:45:52 GMT
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Followup-To: gnu.emacs.help
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> Of course, the root of the problem is that emacs gets out of touch with the
> characters that are actually on the screen; the "right" solution would be
> to do what Gosling Emacs did, and only send the characters as fast as they
> will be received.  That is, if on a 1200 baud line, delay for 1/150th second
> between each character.  This would prevent the (now-common) situation of
> Emacs dumping a screenful of characters into the tty's buffer, and then
> dumping more before the buffer has emptied.

That sounds odd.  Emacs's redisplay is pretty smart.  Does it know what speed
you're at?  Try "stty 1200" before starting Emacs.

> So how about this: what if there was a command, similar in usage to
> define-keyboard-macro, which would read a sequence of keystrokes and then
> execute them?  Since Emacs would get the keystrokes all at once, there would
> be no chance for redisplay to get out of synch with the buffering on the 
> terminal line, and no thrashing.  Would such a thing be possible?

I think such a thing might be possible.  In fact, it only took five minutes or
so.

;;; read-kbd-macro.el -- Read a sequence of commands from the keyboard.
;;;
;;; Copyright (C) 1990 Roland McGrath
;;;
;;; This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
;;; it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
;;; the Free Software Foundation; either version 1, or (at your option)
;;; any later version.
;;;
;;; This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
;;; but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
;;; MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
;;; GNU General Public License for more details.
;;;
;;; A copy of the GNU General Public License can be obtained from this
;;; program's author (send electronic mail to roland@ai.mit.edu) or from
;;; the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 675 Mass Ave, Cambridge, MA
;;; 02139, USA.
;;;
;;; Send bug reports to roland@ai.mit.edu.
;;;
;;; To use this package, put:
;;;    (autoload 'read-kbd-macro "read-kbd-macro" nil t)
;;;    (autoload 'read-execute-kbd-macro "read-kbd-macro" nil t)
;;; in your .emacs or site-init.el, and bind these functions to
;;; keys as you desire, e.g.:
;;;    (global-set-key "\C-ce" 'read-execute-kbd-macro)
;;;    (global-set-key "\C-cr" 'read-kbd-macro)

(defun read-kbd-macro ()
  "Read a sequence of commands from the keyboard, ending when
 \\[end-kbd-macro] is read, and assign it to `last-kbd-macro'.
It can then be executed with \\[call-last-kbd-macro] or
named with \\[name-last-kbd-macro]."
  (interactive)
  (let ((keys '(""))
	(prompt "Reading keyboard macro: "))
    (while (not (eq (key-binding (car keys)) 'end-kbd-macro))
      (setq keys (cons (read-key-sequence prompt) keys)
	    prompt (concat prompt " " (key-description (car keys)))))
    (setq last-kbd-macro (mapconcat 'identity (nreverse (cdr keys)) ""))
    (message "Keyboard macro defined: %s" (key-description last-kbd-macro))))

(defun read-execute-kbd-macro ()
  "Read a sequence of commands from the keyboard using \\[read-kbd-macro],
and then execute it using \\[call-last-kbd-macro]."
  (interactive)
  (read-kbd-macro)
  (call-last-kbd-macro))