notifications in zmacs

[Doug Dodds <DODDS at SCRC-TENEX>]

    Date: Monday, 4 June 1984, 02:01-EDT
    From: David M. J. Saslav <saz at MIT-OZ>


    Could someone hack ZMACS so that upon return from responding to
    a notification
    or visiting some other program (after having been notified
    of the need to visit by a notification at the bottom of the screen
    beneath the ZMACS line), that notification would be cleared?

    It is very confusing to have to recheck, say, my telnet connection
    because my bottom minibuffer still reads "Process Terminal-1 
    wants to type out", etc.

    I realize this would be difficult to do, since there are so many
    different types of notifications, but I would like to know what
    the tradeoffs involved in its implementation would actually be.

I understand your complaint, I have frequently been bothered by stale
notifications littering several windows, including the typeout windows
of my Zmail and Zmacs.

On the other hand, every notification contains a time; in the 247
development system, the time is even to the second.  This makes it
pretty easy to sort out what is new.  Also, if confused, you can review,
say, the latest 6 notifications: (print-notifications 0 5).
[Unfortunately, they are numbered backwards, starting with 0 for the
latest.]  Finally, if you want to get rid of them, you can form a habit
of flushing the typein-window notifications, as I have, by typing Abort
to Zmail and Zmacs.

I don't know all the issues involved, but I am pretty sure that doing
what you ask automatically would be more trouble than it is worth.  I
suspect that it would even be difficult to define what was to be done,
in such a way that there was no danger of losing notifications that the
user should see.  Better to stay in conscious control of what is to be
flushed.