Re: thoughts on status messages

[Benno Schulenberg]

Op 05-03-2021 om 19:02 schreef Mike Frysinger:
> when you have constantshow enabled, moving the cursor at all will clear
> those messages.  and there's no way to bring them back.  so if nano did
> show something that happened to catch my eye but i started editing too
> fast, it'd be gone forever.

From this I guess that a keystroke that reshows the last shown message
would already be a great help?

> random ideas:
> * a "console" that would hold all messages shown in the current buffer.

An error log /per buffer/...  Oof.  I think that goes too far.  That is
not something that fits nano.

>   it'd be like opening a read-only file, so the user could move their
>   cursor around and search and copy and such.  it can be switched to
>   like the help pane via a keyboard shortcut.  to make it discoverable,
>   add an aside when messages are shown like "(^P to view log)".

Such an aside would be majorly ugly, I wouldn't want to see that.  If
any error log existed, I think it should be unbound by default, only
accessible for people who read the manual and bind the function.

> * messages would stack up & disappear automatically at the bottom of the
>   screen rather than being a single line shared with the constantshow.

As you use constantshow, maybe it would help if an error message overrode
constantshow for ten or twenty keystrokes?  By default (when not using
--quickblank or --constantshow or --minibar) nano leaves any message on
the screen for twenty keystrokes.  Maybe it should keep error messages
onscreen for that long also when --constantshow is used?

(By the way: what info do you need from --constantshow?  All nine items,
or are there things you can absolutely do without?)

> * turn the "Modified" space in the upper right into more of a flag space
>   for multiple states.  M for modified, R for read-only, LF/CRLF for the
>   line ending mode, etc...
That already kind of exists, since nano-5.3: --stateflags.  Except that
it shows states of the editor, not states of the buffer.

With --stateflags, a modified buffer is indicated by a star after the
file name (in the title bar or in the mini bar).  When a file is not
writable, maybe a minus or equals sign could be shown?  And when this
unwritable buffer was modified, an exclamation mark?

I don't really see the need to indicate the line ending somewhere, as I
think DOS-formatted files are getting exceedingly rare on Unix systems.
(That's why --minibar gives no indication at all about the format of the
file.)

Benno

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