Re: Power: blink-cursor-mode is a pig

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Thu, 29 Dec 2011 15:54:50 -0800
> From: Daniel Colascione <address@hidden>
> 
> I think the reasoning behind this behavior has gone stale: blink-cursor
> is on by default; most people use click-to-focus windowing systems; and
> Emacs often runs on devices with batteries.

FWIW, I _hate_ click-to-focus windowing systems.  They prevent me from
typing into a partially-obscured window while looking at a window in
the foreground; I need this frequently because I frequently work on
small displays.  When I need to work on a system whose default is
click-to-focus (e.g., MS-Windows), the first thing I do is figure out
how to set focus-follows-mouse operation, and then set it up.

> We should send focus and blur events eagerly so blink-cursor can
> turn itself off.  (Ideally, we'd also stop blinking the cursor when
> Emacs is invisible, but I imagine it's rare for a window to be both
> focused and invisible.)
> 
> Is there an easier way of stopping the blink-cursor timer than plumbing
> new events through the Emacs core, or turning blink-cursor off?

Let me turn the table and ask you why do you think we need to deliver
the focus-lost event to Lisp, if all we want is stop the cursor from
blinking?  Cursor blinking is implemented on the low level in C; why
can't we disable it at that same level, without bothering the command
loop and the input queue with events they don't need to see?