Re: [vile] Detecting if vile is idle

[Chris Green]

On Tue, Mar 08, 2016 at 09:20:12PM +1100, Brendan O'Dea wrote:
> On 7 March 2016 at 21:54, Chris Green <address@hidden> wrote:
> > On Fri, Mar 04, 2016 at 11:33:42AM +0000, Chris Green wrote:
> >> I want to detect if vile has been idle for a period (i.e. five minutes
> >> or so) while editing a file.  Would it be possible to hijack the
> >> autocolor variable and the autocolor-hook to do this?
> >>
> >> It will only be for one specific case where I am using vile via a
> >> wrapper script and syntax highlighting isn't required.
> >>
> >> If I set autocolor to 300000 (five minutes) will autocolor-hook get
> >> called after five minutes of idleness?  I can then do what I want by
> >> 'setv $autocolor-hook <some new script>'.
> 
> You can of course set autocolor-hook to do anything you like.  It is
> however only called if the buffer was recently modified, so you will
> need to have changed something for it to fire the first time, and to
> have made subsequent changes for it keep firing.  Note also that if
> you have multiple buffers visible, it will fire once for each of them
> which has been recently changed.
> 
There won't be multiple buffers, however the need for something to
have changed is a problem for my application as, in the usual
case, I just open the file and look at it (then forget to close it,
which is the point of the exercise).


>   setv %counter 1
>   store-procedure something 'Do something periodically'
>       write-message &cat 'Something! ' %counter
>       setv %counter &add %counter 1
>   ~endm
>   setv $autocolor-hook something
>   setv $autocolor 5000
> 
> If you source that file, then muck about a bit you can observe the
> behaviour: it should spit out a message five(ish) seconds of idle time
> after the last buffer change.
> 
In my case I want it to save and exit after the specified idle time.


> >> Can I set autocolor to such a large value (64-bit Linux machine)?
> 
> Yes, 300,000 fits easily into a 32-bit integer.  Changing the 5000 in
> the example above to 300000 works fine, with the caveats noted above
> about recent changes.
> 
Thanks, I just wasn't sure how big an integer it would be.


> So in short: if it is a one-off action you want taken after five
> minutes of no activity and you can initially make a change to the
> buffer to tickle the recent modification bit, then this will probably
> work fine.
> 
Do you have any clever ideas as to how I can "tickle the recent
modification bit" programmatically (in a custom .vilerc or similar)? 
It would then be perfect for what I want, exit after a timeout so I
don't leave sensitive encrypted files on show.


> I can think of a case were I could have used this: our revision
> control system at work used to have the annoying behaviour that when
> mailing out a code change for review to a colleague it would do a
> bunch of sometimes long-running pre-submit checks before firing up the
> editor with the contents of a boiler-plate email to said colleague.
> It was not uncommon to give up waiting for the checks and wander off
> to lunch, to then later wonder why they hadn't attended your code
> review... only to find an xterm somewhere with the editor waiting for
> the email text to be saved.  Given that in 99% of cases I would just
> hit ZZ at that point, being able to do that programatically after some
> idle period would have been very useful.  Fortunately the problem was
> solved in a different way: the software was changed to prompt for the
> email contents *first*.
> 
Almost exactly my requirement, though the reason for needing it is
different.

Thanks for your help.

-- 
Chris Green