Re: Popup when buffer file is changed on disk

[Luc Teirlinck]

Richard Stallman wrote:

   I don't want to install this; I think it would be annoying.

I believe that it would be very annoying.  It is apparently something
people who use MS Windows applications are used to, but I guess that
is because they have systematically adapted their customizations and
work habits to it.

I believe that autorevert mostly covers the functionality.  The only
problem is that autorevert quits either reverting or warning if the
buffer is modified.  (Emacs _does_ warn when you try to save your
changes to disk.)

I believe that it would not be too difficult to adapt the code in
autorevert to put a flag in the modeline that says whether the visited
file has changed on disk or not, regardless of whether the buffer is
modified or not.  This would be a mode (more of a mode line feature)
that could be enabled independently from Auto Revert.  If you do not
use Auto Revert, it would just tell you that the file had changed on
disk, leaving the decision of whether to revert or not up to the user.
It would be analogous to the flag telling you that you have new mail.
It would also not be very difficult to add a global flag indicating
that at least one file visited in some buffer has changed on disk, but
I believe that would be less useful than the "local" variant.

While I do not believe that would be terribly difficult to implement,
I personally do not have the time right now and we are in a feature freeze.

Sincerely,

Luc.