Announcing introspector.el, for examining faces, extents, etc.

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

introspector is a package I've had in a sandbox for a while.  It's
basically 21.5-ready, but I wanted to put it in xemacs-base and
xemacs-devel so it could be used with 21.4, too.  introspector
consists of

- frame-utils.el, providing two functions to create frames with
minimal decorations, such as would be useful with tooltips and the
like.  Unfortunately, under 21.4 I've found a focus problem (the tip
frame should not get keyboard focus, but it does) and a decoration
problem (I can't get the title bar to disappear).  These probably
aren't show-stopperse, but they're horribly ugly.

- introspector.el, providing a popup version of `what-cursor-position'
which also provides more extensive information such as extents and
faces touching point.  This is based on a general framework for
inspecting buffer objects.

I'm not sure how useful the general framework is, but the frame
utilities and the popup `buffer-position-introspector' are quite
useful as they are.

A git repository may be available later, but for now the package is
available as an XEmacs package at

http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp/Tools/XEmacs/introspector-0.80-pkg.tar.gz

Install it as usual.  Sorry for the inconvenience, but you'll have to
explicitly load the introspector library.  This does two invasive
things:
(1) it binds C-h = to `buffer-position-introspector', and
(2) adds a pre-command-hook to pop down the introspector popup on any
    command.
Possibly this should be set up as a minor mode (comments welcome), and
then it would be no problem to have autoloads for the user-visible
entry points.

Testing and suggestions would be greatly appreciated.  I think it
would be appropriate to put frame-utils in xemacs-base, if we can work
out the issues with 21.4.  I'm of two minds about introspector, it
could go into xemacs-devel, but maybe it should go into xemacs-base
so that all users can use it to gather information for bug reports.