[comp.emacs] Time updates / display-time in time.el

mike@turing.unm.edu.UUCP (09/17/87)

I had tehe following problem and experience:

I wanted to have display-time-day-and-date on in most buffers, but off
in an RMAIL buffer (so you can see all the attributes of a message.

I plowed through documentation, discovered how to use hooks and
make-variable-buffer-local, when I noticed that it took a considerable
time for the change to take effect upon changing buffers.  WHY???
I plowed through still more code, looking at redisplay functions,
etc., seeing a few UGLY hacks, and figured out that display-time needs
to have the variable display-time-interval set BEFORE calling
display-time.  Furthermore, calling display-time a second time does
NOTHING if the loadst process is still running.  I think it should
check if the display-time-interval variable is changed, and restart
loadst appropriately.  Better still, get rid of the loadst program
entirely.  This is an old hack from Gosling Emacs (look at loadst.c).
Just add a timed interrupt facility to emacs, which would specify that
a particular function be called at a certain time.  

One of the hacks in time.el:  If the date is to be displayed, then the
time from loadst is concatenated to the date received from ctime!!
Why not just use the time from ctime as well??  Because you still need
loadst to interrupt and get your function to run to update the
display.  ACK!!!!

					Michael I. Bushnell
					a/k/a Bach II
					mike@turing.UNM.EDU
---
Why is it that when you DIE, you can't take your
 HOME ENTERTAINMENT CENTER with you??
				-- Zippy the Pinhead

jr@LF-SERVER-2.BBN.COM (John Robinson) (09/18/87)

To solve your immediate problem (no display-time in RMAIL buffers),
modify the mode-line-format for those buffers to omit
global-mode-string.

/jr
jr@bbn.com or jr@bbn.uucp