Re: Overalays and point-entered

[Nathaniel Flath]

Using help-at-pt and setting the delay to 0 does end up doing what I want, thanks.  I agree that this is a globally useful feature, which is why I was thinking of working to fix it at a lower level instead of just hacking around the deficiencies.  Help-at-pt isn't the most elegant of solutions either, but as long as it's part of emacs I suppose I'm fine with it.

On Thu, Sep 10, 2009 at 8:04 PM, Stefan Monnier <address@hidden> wrote:

> Essentially, I wanted to add echo-area messages to Flymake when the point
> was in a section highlighted as an error.  js2-mode does this using text
> properties when it defines overlays, which is another option I could look
> at, but it seems much better to be able to just have an overlay for all of
> this related information.  Flymake does use tooltips to display th error
> message, but those seem to be only able to display when the mouse is over
> the text, unless I'm missing something.

This is a globally useful feature.  You might like to take a look at
help-at-pt.el.  Notice that the feature you're trying to implement does
not require hooking into the point-motion itself (like
point-enter/point-leave/intangible properties) but only into the cursor
movement (i.e. the position of point betwen commands).  This is an
important difference, since one is implemented at a very low level and
affects all kinds of unrelated operations, whereas the other is
implemented at a very high level and interacts with very little
other code.


       Stefan