Re: Screensaver support for the Hurd console

[Marcus Brinkmann]

At Tue, 11 Jan 2005 16:21:37 +0100,
Alfred M Szmidt wrote:
>    The console is not emacs.
> 
> In many ways it is, a user might wish to do things like playing a
> specific melody on a bell event, or beep instead of flashing the
> screen.

Already possible (or possible with minimal changes - not sure if the
feature is accessibel through options right now).

> Maybe adding a mode-line that displays information about the
> current VC, adding a way to change events without having to restart
> the console, etc etc.

An "On Screen Display" which allows information and configuration is
something I have always considered from the very start.  The
difficulty here is fixing up the clipping code to allow for such an
OSD (while still seeing text scroll behind it etc).  Not terribly
hard, but annoying to write (similar reason why I didn't put in
marking regions for c&p at the time I wrote it).

To allow configuration after initialization, configuration hooks need
to be added to the plugins.  If you want, you could also use such
hooks to change the configuration via a guile-capable plugin.  This is
what I meant in my other mail with designing it as a plugin.

>    So the question is only if the option to use guile should be added,
>    which I don't think is a good idea, but at least it is a subject
>    that can be debated.  I note however that using guile would do
>    nothing about figuring out what the defaults should be, and it
>    would add a significant bunch of code to a critical system service.
> 
> I have already started playing with it, and it won't add "significant
> bunch of code" from the looks.  I'd say that the changes are going to
> be minimal.

It will add libguile, which is significant (up to 500 KB from the looks).
 
Thanks,
Marcus