25.5.1 Event Types

Events represent keyboard or mouse activity or status changes of various sorts, such as process input being available or a timeout being triggered. The different event types are as follows:

key-press event

A key was pressed.

Note: Modifier keys such as “control”, “shift”, and “alt” do not generate events; instead, they are tracked internally by SXEmacs, and non-modifier key presses generate events that specify both the key pressed and the modifiers that were held down at the time.

button-press event

button-release event

A button was pressed or released. Along with the button that was pressed or released, button events specify the modifier keys that were held down at the time and the position of the pointer at the time.

motion event

The pointer was moved. Along with the position of the pointer, these events also specify the modifier keys that were held down at the time.

misc-user event

A menu item was selected, the scrollbar was used, or a drag or a drop occurred.

process event

Input is available on a process.

timeout event

A timeout has triggered.

magic event

Some window-system-specific action (such as a frame being resized or a portion of a frame needing to be redrawn) has occurred. The contents of this event are not accessible at the elisp level, but dispatch-event knows what to do with an event of this type.

eval event

This is a special kind of event specifying that a particular function needs to be called when this event is dispatched. An event of this type is sometimes placed in the event queue when a magic event is processed. This kind of event should generally just be passed off to dispatch-event. See Dispatching an Event.