Re: things on the minibar are distracting

[Benno Schulenberg]

Op 23-01-2021 om 21:36 schreef Seb:
> Would it be possible, for this option, to use the
> bottom-most lines of the screen to display the file's contents and if ^W is
> pressed (for example), to replace the bottom-most lines by Nano's message? In
> other words, to reserve the space for Nano only when it needs it?

That would be cool.  But it would be terribly inefficient: nano would have to
redraw the entire screen whenever a message appears or a prompt is invoked,
because it would need to redefine the editing window to have one row less, to
prevent overwriting the bottom row with text from the buffer.  Also, when the
cursor is on the bottom row when the message appears or the prompt is invoked,
all the text in the editing window would need to scroll one row up, to make
room.  This might be distracting, or even startling.

> If ^C is too chatty, why not change ^C? (Although it seems fine for my uses.)

I cannot change ^C, because there are people who use --constantshow, and ^C
is simply a temporary --constantshow, and those people will likely be quite
used to the current format.  You yourself have said that I should not change
old behavior.  (Also, if changing what ^C/--constantshow shows, what to change?
What is superfluous?  What is needed?  It will be different for different 
users.)

> I don't really want to argue about what's useful or not; my main point is 
> that to
> me, flashing numbers are distracting.

Then... do not use --minibar: it apparently doesn't suit you.

> Would there be a middle ground in an rc-setting that would let the user choose
> the color for "line,column" and "charcode"? I could then set them to the
> background's color :-)

I do not want any configurability of the minibar.

> I don't deny that it can be really useful to see charcodes. I merely say that 
> it
> is rarely useful. Thus it may not deserve a permanent (and flashing) place on 
> the
> screen.

But I don't like it that I would have to /do/ something in order to see the
current character code.  And I don't like things to change (fields moving
their position), so that's why the character code is always there, so that
I can ignore it until I need it.  (And ignoring it is easy for me, because
it seems that most of the time I edit in the center of the screen.)

> It's been a long time since I've had messages at the bottom of the screen.

Whenever you open a file, you get the "Read nnn lines" message; whenever you
search for something and it isn't found, you get "Not found"; whenever you make
replacements, you get "Replaced nnn occurrences".  You don't do any of those
things?

> The patch (for v5.5) failed with the message:
> 
> patching file src/nano.c
> Hunk #1 FAILED at 185.
> Hunk #2 FAILED at 2080.
> 2 out of 2 hunks FAILED -- saving rejects to file src/nano.c.rej

When reporting that something fails, you also need to provide the command
that you used.

Patching nano-5.5 in its main directory works fine for me:

$ patch -p1 <make-M-C-suppress-the-minibar.patch
patching file src/nano.c
patching file src/winio.c


Benno

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