Emacs: pulsar version 0.5.0

2022-08-19

Pulsar is a small package that temporarily highlights the current line, either on demand or automatically after invoking a function that is present in a user-defined list. Watch the demo

Further below are the release notes.

• Package name (GNU ELPA): pulsar
• Official manual: https://protesilaos.com/emacs/pulsar
• Change log: https://protesilaos.com/emacs/pulsar-changelog
• Git repo on SourceHut: https://git.sr.ht/~protesilaos/pulsar
  • Mirrors:
    • GitHub: https://github.com/protesilaos/pulsar
    • GitLab: https://gitlab.com/protesilaos/pulsar
• Mailing list: https://lists.sr.ht/~protesilaos/pulsar

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• Added convenience functions/commands to pulse a line using one of the provided faces. These can be used interactively or via Lisp (e.g. be assigned to a hook). They are:
  • pulsar-pulse-line-red
  • pulsar-pulse-line-green
  • pulsar-pulse-line-yellow
  • pulsar-pulse-line-blue
  • pulsar-pulse-line-magenta
  • pulsar-pulse-line-cyan

• Deprecated pulsar-pulse-on-window-change due to complications it created in some edge cases. Part of this effort was to fix a bug that pertained to a duplicate pulse when the pulsar commands were invoked via M-x. The duplication had the effect of potentially overriding the color of the pulse such as if, say, pulsar-pulse-line-red was invoked while the pulsar-face was blue.

• Restored several command symbols to the default value of pulsar-pulse-functions. Those were disabled to support the use option pulsar-pulse-on-window-change, but as that is now removed we revert to the old and more predictable way of handling things.

• Introduced conditionality that checks for real-this-command. This is necessary for commands that have to fudge this-command to provide their functionality. Such is the case with the evil-scroll-up and evil-scroll-down commands which are internally reported as previous-line and next-line, respectively. I discovered this problem while trying to support Duy Nguyen attempts that making pulsar work with evil.

  Thanks to Duy Nguyen for reporting the issue on the mailing list and then to Tom Dalziel who explained why evil does things the way it does (it is a good reason):

  • https://lists.sr.ht/~protesilaos/pulsar/%3C89566F5C-25AD-4281-94CB-031FE8878119%40gmail.com%3E
  • https://lists.sr.ht/~protesilaos/pulsar/%3C87pmgy3vzq.fsf%40protesilaos.com%3E
  • https://github.com/emacs-evil/evil/issues/1659

• Documented how to use pulsar with the next-error-hook. By default, the n and p keys in Emacs’ compilation buffers (e.g. the results of a grep search) produce a highlight for the locus of the given match. Due to how the code is implemented, we cannot use Pulsar’s standard mechanism to trigger a pulse after the match is highlighted (i.e. by adding the commands to pulsar-pulse-functions. Instead, the user must add this to their configuration:

  (add-hook 'next-error-hook #'pulsar-pulse-line)
  

• Made other miscellaneous changes to tweak the code base and the manual.