RE: make-progress-reporter suggestions: 'modeline and customizableprogress-reporter--pulse-characters

[Drew Adams]

> What's the benefit of more than 1 spinning indicator in a
> single-threaded editor?  At best they are
> distracting.  What's an example where it would be useful?

Uh, I thought this was supposed to be a kind of progress indicator, in
particular for an async process.  Forgive me for not reading the thread in
detail, if that's not the case.

But if that is the case, then can't you imagine wanting to know the status of
more than one activity in progress?  Whether those activities are carried out
truly in parallel is beside the point.  Surely you can launch more than one
process (grep, compile, download,...) and want to know the progress of each.
Whether things are done in one thread or 1000 seems irrelevant here.

Again, if I misunderstood the aim, milles excuses.

But we do agree about one thing, at least from the sound of it: "at _best_ they
are distracting".  Even with N=1, I would add.

> DA> FWIW - All in all, personally I would find this feature a 
> DA> distraction.  I would be one user who would turn it off.  YAGNI.
> 
> OK, so you're against it.  Why spend so much time giving 
> suggestions for something you won't use?

To prevent your co-opting and cluttering up the mode line, minibuffer, echo
area, etc. with a spinning, blinking, shining, sparkling, or flashing fishing
lure.

For that reason, my main argument has been for users to be able to turn it off.
But I would also like to see it kept out of such areas by default.  Making such
annoying bling an option, turned off by default, is fine with me, wherever you
might enjoy sticking it.

I suggested using a separate small buffer window/frame (no decoration, like a
tooltip), so the location could be wherever you want - and the indicator
wouldn't take over any of the important candidate spots named so far.  Just one
idea among many discussed.  None of them sound very good to me so far.

There's really no reason to give this a fixed, a priori position anywhere - it's
not logically associated with the fringe (no special line), the echo area (not
punctual feedback), the minibuffer, the toolbar, or a mode line.  It doesn't
necessarily belong anywhere in particular.  So my thought was to let the
location be programmable or user customizable - a separate frame.