Ages and ages I wrote about letting Emacs code access the notification area.  I have more to say about it now, but first I want to bore you with some rambling thoughts and some history.

The “notification area” is also called the “status icon area” or the “systray” — it is a spot that holds some icons that are under control of various applications.

I was a fan of the notification area since it first showed up in Gnome.  I recognized it instantly as the thing I wanted that I hadn’t realized I wanted.

Now, as you know, the notification area has fallen on hard times.  It’s been removed in Gnome 3… I searched a bit for the rationale for this deletion, which as far as I can tell is just that some applications abused it, whatever that means; or that it was used inconsistently, which I think the web has conclusively proven is fine by users.  Coming from the Emacs perspective, where one can customize the somewhat-equivalent of the status area (see those recent posts on diminishing minor-mode lighters in the mode line…), and where a certain amount of per-mode idiosyncrasy is the norm, these seem like an inadequate reasons.

However, the reason doesn’t really matter.  I love the notification area!  When I moved more of my daily desktop use back into Emacs (the tides are strong but slow, and take years to come in or go out), I hooked Emacs up to it, and made it a part of my basic configuration.

It’s indispensable now.  What I particularly like about it is that it is both noticeable and unobtrusive — the former because I can have the icons blink on important events, and the latter because the icons don’t move around or obscure other windows.

Ok!  You should use it!  And I totally plan to tell you how, but first some boring history.

My original post relied on a hacked version of the Gnome zenity utility.  This turned out to be a real pain over time.  I had to rebuild it periodically, adding hacks (once removing chunks), etc.  Sharing it with others was hard.  And, for whatever reason, the patches in Gnome bugzilla were completely ignored.  Bah.

A bit later I wrote a big patch to Emacs to put all this into the core.  That patch was rejected, more or less.  Bah two.

Then even later I flirted with KDE for a bit.  Yes.  KDE had the nice idea to expose the notification area via dbus, and Emacs could talk dbus… so I did the obvious thing in elisp.  However the KDE notification area was pretty buggy and in the end I had to abandon it as well.

So, it was back to zenity… until this week, during my funemployment.  I rewrote my hacks in Python.  This was so easy I wish I’d done it years and years ago.

I’m not sure what the moral of this story is.  Maybe that my obsession is your gain.  Or maybe that I have trouble letting go.

Anyway, the result is here, on github, or in marmalade.  You’ll need Python and the new (introspection-based) Python Gtk interfaces.  This of course is no trouble to install.  The package includes the base status icon API, plus basic UIs for ERC and EMMS.  Try it out and let me know what you think.

While streamlining my mode line, I wrote another little mode-line feature that I thought of ages ago — using the background of the mode-line to indicate the current position in the buffer. I didn’t like this enough to use it, but I thought I’d post it since it was a fun hack.

First, make sure the current mode line is kept:

(defvar tromey-real-mode-line-format mode-line-format)

Now, make a little function that format the mode line using the standard rules and then applies a property depending on the current position in the buffer:

(defun tromey-compute-mode-line ()
  (let* ((width (frame-width))
     (line (substring 
        (concat (format-mode-line tromey-real-mode-line-format)
            (make-string width ? ))
        0 width)))
    ;; Quote "%"s.
    (setq line
      (mapconcat (lambda (c)
               (if (eq c ?%)
               "%%"
             ;; It's absurd that we must wrap this.
             (make-string 1 c)))
             line ""))

    (let ((start (window-start))
      (end (or (window-end) (point))))
      (add-face-text-property (round (* (/ (float start)
                       (point-max))
                    (length line)))
                  (round (* (/ (float end)
                       (point-max))
                    (length line)))
                  'region nil line))
    line))

We have to do this funny wrapping and “%”-quoting business here because the :eval form returns a mode line format — not just text — and because the otherwise appealing :propertize form doesn’t allow computations.

Also, I’ve never understood why mapconcat can’t handle a character result from the map function.  Anybody?

Now set this to be the mode line:

(setq-default mode-line-format '((:eval (tromey-compute-mode-line))))

The function above changes the background of the mode line corresponding to the current window’s start and end positions.  So, for example, here we are in the middle of a buffer that is bigger than the window:

I left this on for a bit but found it too distracting.  If you like it, use it. You might like to remove the mode-line-position stuff from the mode line, as it seems redundant with the visual display.

The default mode line looks like this:

At least, it looks sort of like this if you ignore the lamenesses in the screenshot. If you’re like me you probably don’t remember what all these things mean, at least not without looking them up.  What’s that “U”?  Why the “:” or why three hyphens?

At a local Emacs meetup with Damon Haley and Greg Pfeil, Greg mentioned that he’d done some experiments on using unicode characters in his mode-line.  I decided to give it a try.

I took a good look at the above.  I rarely use any of it — I normally don’t care about the coding system or the line ending style.  I can’t remember the last time I had a buffer that was both read-only and modified.  The VC information, when it appears, is generally too verbose and doesn’t show me the one thing I need to know (see below).  And, though I do like to see the name of the major mode, I don’t really need to see most minor mode names; furthermore I like to have a bit of extra space so that I can use other modes that display information that I do want to see in the mode line.

What’s that VC thing?  Well, ordinarily you may see something like Git-master in the mode line. But, usually I already know the version control system being used — or even if I don’t know, I probably don’t care if I am using VC. By default the branch name is in there too. This can be quite long and seems to get stale when I switch branches; and anyway because I do a lot of work via vc-dir, I don’t really need this in every buffer anyway.

However, what is missing is that the mode-line won’t tell me if a buffer should be registered with version control but is not.  This is a pretty common source of errors.

So, first the code to deal with the VC state.  We need a bit more code than you might think, because the information we need isn’t already computed, and my tries to compute it while updating the mode line caused weird behavior.  Our rule for “should be registered” is “a VC back end claims this file, but the file isn’t actually registered”:

(defvar tromey-vc-mode nil)
(make-variable-buffer-local 'tromey-vc-mode)

(require 'vc)
(defun tromey-vc-command-hook (&rest args)
  (let ((file-name (buffer-file-name)))
    (setq tromey-vc-mode (and file-name
                  (not (vc-registered file-name))
                  (ignore-errors
                (vc-responsible-backend file-name))))))

(add-hook 'vc-post-command-functions #'tromey-vc-command-hook)
(add-hook 'find-file-hook #'tromey-vc-command-hook)

(defun tromey-vc-info ()
  (if tromey-vc-mode
      (propertize (string #x26c3 32) 'face 'error)
    " "))

We’ll use that final function in the mode line. Note the odd character in there — my choice was U+26C3 (BLACK DRAUGHTS KING), since I thought it looked disk-drive-like — but you can easily replace it with something else. (Also note the weirdness of using string rather than a string constant. This is just for WordPress’ benefit as its editor kept mangling the actual character.)

To deal with minor modes, I used diminish. This made it easy to remove any display of some modes that I don’t care to know about, and replace the name of some others with a single character:

(require 'diminish)
(diminish 'abbrev-mode)
(diminish 'projectile-mode)
(diminish 'eldoc-mode)
(diminish 'flyspell-mode (string 32 #x2708))
(diminish 'auto-fill-function (string 32 #xa7))
(diminish 'isearch-mode (string 32 #x279c))

Here flyspell is U+2708 (AIRPLANE), auto-fill is U+00A7 (SECTION SIGN), and isearch is U+279C (HEAVY ROUND-TIPPED RIGHTWARDS ARROW).  Haha, Unicode names.

I wanted to try out which-func-mode, now that I had extra space on the mode line, so:

(setq which-func-unknown "")
(which-function-mode)

Finally, we can use all the above and remove some other things from the mode line at the same time:

(setq-default mode-line-format
	      '("%e"
		(:eval (if (buffer-modified-p)
			   (propertize (string #x21a7) 'face 'error)
			 " "))
		(:eval (tromey-vc-info))
		" " mode-line-buffer-identification
		"   " mode-line-position
		"  " mode-line-modes
		mode-line-misc-info))

The “modified” character in there is U+21A7 (DOWNWARDS ARROW FROM BAR).

Here’s how it looks normally (another badly cropped screenshot):

Here’s how it looks when the file is not registered with the version control system:

And here’s how it looks when the file is also modified:

Occasionally I run into some other minor mode I want to diminish, but this is easily done by editing it into my .emacs and evaluating it for immediate effect.