Subject: bug#21652: bell chars

From: Stefan Kangas <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 16 Aug 2020 07:23:29 -0700

Tom Baker <[email-masked]> writes:

> I wrote this because I have a history of setting one command going,
> then going off to do something else, and then remembering an hour
> later "is that command done yet?" and looking to see that it finished
> a half hour before.

This is a valid use case.  But I'm not convinced we should do any
changes in the code to cover it.  The problem here is that everyone's
needs are different, so we would end up having to spread little `beep's
all over the Emacs code base.

May I propose something like the following as an alternative:

   long-running-command.sh ; aplay beep.wav

(Searching the web I also found out about a command line utility
`beep' that may or may not be of interest.)

> Second -- I have little trouble withdrawing the suggestion, because
> the "shelisp" package is a more suitable implementation of my use
> case. The idea of an advice got to be a little sloppy of an
> implementation because the sound would come put before the call, or
> after the call, and not synchronized with the other characters.

I don't know what shelisp is or how it relates to the current
discussion.  Could you please clarify?

I'm sorry to hear you had no success with advice.  That would be the
canonical way to add specialized behaviour to a function in Emacs, but
sometimes it can be a bit finicky to get the details right.  Perhaps you
could ask on the emacs-help mailing list about it.

> Thanks for your volunteer work in maintaining the emacs software!

Thanks for using it!

Best regards,
Stefan Kangas