Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!bbn!jr@bbn.com
From: jr@bbn.com (John Robinson)
Newsgroups: gnu.emacs
Subject: Re: Minor modes
Message-ID: <35718@bbn.COM>
Date: 8 Feb 89 05:01:55 GMT
References: <35717@bbn.COM>
Sender: news@bbn.COM
Reply-To: jr@bbn.com (John Robinson)
Organization: BBN Systems and Technologies Corporation, Cambridge MA
Lines: 33
In-reply-to: mesard@bbn.com (Wayne Mesard)

In article <35717@bbn.COM>, mesard@bbn (Wayne Mesard) writes:
>					    Or maybe an "event
>specification" system, so you can say things like:
>
>  (register-event-func 'maybe-wrap '(> (current-column) fill-column))
>  (register-event-func 'line-nums 'window-movedP) ;window-movedP is a function.
>
>In fact, lets just keep 'em on an alist a la auto-mode-alist.  The
>conditional form gets evaluated periodically (once each time through the
>body of command_loop() ?), and if non-nil, the other form is evaluated.

So emacs should be a blackboard system in addition to everything else?
I love it!  Slow?  maybe...  Could it run before each redisplay call
(no more unprocessed characters in the input buffer)?

On line numbers - I seem to remember back in the cowebs somewhere -
was it BBN's PEN editor, or maybe ITS EMACS? - there was a way to link
two windows together so that if one scrolled, the other would too.
This might be a cooler way to get line numbers to work; helpful for
some types of file compares too.  

Another kind of link might allow one window to grow while the next one
shrank, and if there were "window-local" variables, we might have a
way to do "sections" discussed here recently.  Particularly if the
mode line were optional...

One of Wayne's event checks could detect when the growing one reached
a section end and open the next "window" section.

Just inventing on the fly, that's all, thinking out loud.
--
/jr
jr@bbn.com or bbn!jr