[Emacspeak] Re: finer control of auditory icons

[T.V Raman <raman@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Tim Cross via Emacspeak <emacspeak(a)emacspeak.org> writes:


thanks for the dose of sanity as usual Tim:-)

For anyone on the list who read the previous message in this thread and
randomly copies code from that email into your emacs startup -- be
prepared to live with the consequences -- you'll get two for the price
of one (actually many for the price of zero since you've not paid
anything yet:-)) and will likely have hours of fun playing with the
resulting pieces spread out on your living floor.

With respect to Peter's original message: the questions you ask Peter
are interesting; but I know you've been using Emacspeak since the late
90's so why/how did it take you so long to want to figure this out?:-)

My guess as to why you're hearing auditory icons  when you move
by line is because you've intentionally or inadvertantly turned on
"visual-line-mode" might well be the default in newer emacsuns. I'm not
going to go into details as to why that icon is necessary -- left as an
exercise for the student to figure it out.

The auditory icons are organized under emacspeak/sounds; one directory
per theme, just open the directory in dired and hit either C-RET (in X)
or C-j if running on a TTY on each file to hear it -- the names are
self-explanatory.

Re volume of icons: there is no "right gain level" and I never bothered
with gain-setting options because of variations in play programs across
platforms makes this more work than it is worth. I use headphones for
the most part and themes like pan-chimes (my default for many years now)
and 3d are well tuned in my opinion to be useful without being
intrusive; the old "classic" theme is likely not as well tuned -- 3d and
pan-chimes also work much better with headphones.



And finally, Tim is correct, it makes no sense to mix old and new
flavors of advice in a single codebase.

All of emacspeak is lexically scoped now --- has been for a few years,
and in emacspeak-56, I replaced 
the 2014 version of ems-interactive-p (which used backtrace-frame)
see the blog article from that time (2014) with a version that Stefan
Monnier helped me create. The reasoning was that backward-frame is
fragile (called-interactively-p also uses that and is also fragile) --
the new version uses defadvice on defadvice -- something that I did not
know one could do. Time will tell whether that creates any issues -- but
we can always go back to the older version which worked  without errors
for 8+ years.



The convert HTML email to markdown is senseless as Tim points out -- shr
is a good HTML renderer and though you can map Markdown to HTML, you'll
get a lot of grief if you convert HTML to Markdown; there are far too
many HTML idioms in the wild for any sane human to be able to accomplish
 such a conversion that is not lossy.

--Raman 

--Raman