Fw: displaying variables in gdb mode

[David Kastrup]

"Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen at xemacs.org> writes:

> What do you mean by "normal operations"?  If you turn balloon-help on,
> it does not interfere with clicking toolbar buttons immediately
> although the toolbar will provide help if you do nothing for quite
> some time.  Isn't that normal operation?
>
> Have you tried setting `balloon-help-timeout' to something other than
> the (rather high) default of 1500 (milliseconds)?  I cannot perceive
> any delay at all with it set to 50.  (0 doesn't work right because of
> weirdness, a bug if you like, in the timer code.)
>
>     David> "does not cause the Windows port to crash".
>
> Don't recall hearing of that before, either.  :-(  You wouldn't happen
> to be able to point to a debugger stack trace, would you?

At the danger of repeating myself: I don't use XEmacs, and I don't use
Windows.  And if at a customer site an editing system happens to
crash, I won't start compiling and debugging stuff there.

Again: if you think that balloon-help-mode is intended to be
production quality, enable it by default in XEmacs 21.5.  That should
give you much more valuable feedback than year-old recollections and
anecdotal impressions and third-hand evidence of mine, a non-user of
XEmacs.

If you turn it on by default, preview-latex and maybe other
applications will immediately make use of it.  And it appears that it
also would be desirable in a gdb-mode to come.  I should probably have
refrained from posting the snide remark I did, as the future
availability of a gud-mode port would likely have resulted in making a
better case than I could.

But anyway: tooltips can be quite helpful, and by adopting them early,
you ensure that application developers will actually start bothering
to put appropriate tips in their application.  This takes time, and so
one should start early before the next stable release.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum