Re: Reducing mouse-dependency In Emacs.

[Richard Stallman]

    Rather than introducing new properties, I'd think it's better to have
    an option to display the text defined thru mouse-face and help-echo
    when point is anywhere inside the text covered by those properties.

I agree that it would be better to use the existing properties in
different ways, if we can work out a way to do so.

    The idea would be that `help-echo' could rely on the fact that the
    user is busy using the mouse, `short-help' on the fact that he is
    using the keyboard (if it makes a difference) and `long-help' would
    provide more thorough documentation, in a more limited number of
    situations.

`long-help' seems superfluous; we already have the doc string for that.
I think it is ok to define `short-help' for this purpose, when the default
handling seems suboptimal; but we should try to provide a default that is
good enough that few commands need to use `short-help'.

    Two other functions `next-help-echo-region' and
    `previous-help-echo-region' would carry one forward and backward to
    the beginning of successive regions with non-nil `help-echo'
    properties.  (They are bound to C-tab and C-M-tab in the
    implementation below.)

I agree that this feature could be useful.  However, it won't be
terribly useful if people have to remember commands for it.  It will
be much more useful if we can find a self-evident way to invoke it.
That may not be possible, but let's try.  Can people try looking for
one?