Re: RFC: status icon support again

[Stefan Monnier]

> On the other hand, space for status icons is limited and generally
> they should be used for more "global" things.  It would be
> disconcerting if the visible status icons changed frequently, say in
> response to switching buffers.

[ Probably talking nonsense because I know nothing about your patch: ]
Maybe you could simply use a separate keymap specifically for the
status icons.  This would be stored in a terminal-local variable, so
each terminal (aka display) could get its own set of status icons.

The main problem I can imagine is that modifying the keymap will not
automatically call the status-icon code, so we'd have to either
constantly check this keymap for changes, or use
a force-status-icon-update function which would cause a rescan of the
keymap to discover which icons should be added/removed/modified/...

Not sure if it's really better than special purpose code.

And of course, I'm ignoring (and ignorant) of the other side: how to
react to the user clicking on one of those icons.  Should these events
be looked in the usual keymaps?

Ideally the C code should just provide a low-level access to the
facilities on top of which either solution can be implemented in elisp.


        Stefan