Re: Emacs 21 font issues and manual window manipulation.

[Eli Zaretskii]

On 21 Oct 2001, Kevin A. Burton wrote:

> It seems to me that things are currently broken

Bad attitude for starting a discussion with developers, IMHO ;-)

> I have been playing with the ability have code 'sensing' functionality within
> Emacs.  Basically this would help the user navigate an API which they are
> unfamiliar with by using tool-tips.  This would be similar to MS intellisense 
> or
> any of the other code completion technologies.
> 
> So basically if you are writing some lisp code and you typed:
> 
> '(find-file '
> 
> You would see a tooltip (at the right time) that displayed something like:
> 
> 'find-file is an interactive compiled Lisp function in `files'.
> (find-file FILENAME &optional WILDCARDS)'
> <snip>

Similar (almost identical) feature exists already: see
lisp/emacs-lisp/eldoc.el.  If you want to have the info pop in a
tooltip, please consider extending eldoc.el and donating the diffs.

> This work in theory but there is no way for me to get an x-offset
> and y-offset for the tooltip because Emacs doesn't provide any way
> for me to find the x-offset and y-offset for the pointer.

I think you don't need to.  See the doc string of x-show-tip: it says
that if tooltip-frame-parameters alist includes `left' and `top'
parameters, these parameters determine where the tooltip is popped.

> This pattern seems to be in a lot of places.  AKA there is no way to set the
> frame width based on pixels.  The only way to set the frame width is to use
> characters.  
> 
> Does this bother anyone else?  Am I missing something?

There are functions on the C level that convert between these two
coordinate systems, but I don't see anything exported to Lisp.  Gerd,
am I missing something?  If not, I guess no Lisp code needed to do
these conversions until now.

Adding this would be a simple matter of providing a Lisp wrapper
around glyph_to_pixel_coords, I think.

> Is this fixed in GNU Emacsen later than 21.0.106.1?

Note that Emacs 21.1 was just released.

> PS.  Is this best place to discuss development issues?

It's the _only_ place.