Re: ding - too often (OS X and in general)

[Christian Schlauer]

"Kevin Gallagher" <address@hidden> writes:

>>> Quitting rings the bell because you do it with the bell character,
>>> C-g.  Also, it works by causing something almost indistiguishable from
>>> an error.
>>
>> Of course we could distinguish them.  I do think it's important to do
>> something when execution is interrupted by C-g so the user can tell the
>> difference between normal and abnormal termination.  But I can see
>> the point
>> in making this feedback different than the one corresponding to an error.
>
> Don't forget, one can always set the variable visible-bell to replace
> the ding with a visible flashing in Emacs.  But this replaces the ding
> in all situations with the visible flashing, which the user might not
> want.

I have a friend that runs Emacs on Mac OS X with visible-bell set to
t. On Windows, it flashes the title bar of the frame. Okay. On
GNU/Linux, it flashes the minibuffer and the first line in the buffer.
Okay. On OS X, it is really irritating: the _whole_ screen flashes
(not only the Emacs frame), like the screen is going to explode. When
one works in a little darker environment, it really blinds the user.

The documentation of visible-bell says `Non-nil means try to flash the
frame to represent a bell.' The frame, not the whole screen.

It would be great if this could be changed to be more like on other
OS.
-- 
Christian Schlauer