I-Searching Efficiently with Speechd-el, Terser Prompts in General

[Veli-Pekka Tätilä]

Hi list,
briefly put, how do I make incremental searching less verbose? Stuff to 
append to .emacs would be great.

The long story. Ever since I've used Win32 list views I've been a big fan of 
incremental searching, and was just thrilled to read that Emacs has it 
smartly implemented, too, unlike my Win32 editor. With the default settings, 
the only changes being maxing the speed of eSPeak, word echo and reading of 
commands set to nil, however, the output is not optimal. IT breaks the 
heuristic of having the most important speech first, so that you don't have 
to wait to get past redundant pieces, and can minimize the time it takes to 
determine that the current item is not relevant, in linearly scanning for 
some piece of text.

The problem is this. The crucial info to me after hitting C-s or C-r is what 
the search has found, I do know what I'm typing and I do know that the mode 
is i-search. Yet what I'm read back before the match is the text "i search", 
that's how it sounds like, every time. if I type in very fast, sometimes it 
tries to utter "message", too, I'm not sure why. As a workaround, maybe you 
could add the mode change prompts at the very end, and they'd only be read 
if the user did not interrupt the speech.

Another minor problem with the incremental search is that new prompts don't 
throw away previous speech. If I hit backspace many times in an incremental 
search I get a hugely long speech string. What I'd like in stead, would be a 
cut to the chase option, throwing away all the pending speech if a key 
command generates new speech before the previous has been spoken completely.

On a nice-to-have note, sometimes it would also be useful to auto-read the 
whole sentence the occurrence was found in to get more context, not just the 
occurrence and the text after it. IF this is not possible, reading the whole 
line would do ok, since that's what my Win32 editor, NoteTab, does in regexp 
searching and so I've gotten used to that.

More broadly, I would not want to hear any messages, if I know by keystrokes 
what I'm doing. SO when I undo or yank back text, I would just like to hear 
the text that appeared, not prompts like undo, or mark set, for example. Is 
there a quick way to do all this?

It seems to me this section in the docs is what I'm looking for:

http://www.freebsoft.org/doc/speechd-el/speechd-el_9.html#SEC21

How do I write list literals or append to nested lists in Lisp, though? The 
Lisp analogs of the Perl statements:

my @list = qw|foo bar baz|;

and

push @list, ["bar", "baz"];

Of course you cannot easily numerically index linked lists without linear 
searching, but Perl has no linked lists so these are the closest analogs I 
could think of.

-- 
With kind regards Veli-Pekka T?til?
Accessibility, Apps and Coding plus Synths and Music:
http://vtatila.kapsi.fi