what do you want to do in the first place?
It's a GUI abstraction that responds to mouse interaction, so, like a slider, if it's in edit mode, I don't want it to respond to clicks and stuff. This abstraction is based on an external that gets mouse interaction, so it needs to know if PD is in edit mode or not when it is instantiated.
So, how can a slider know what mode PD is in?
whenever the user creates an object, pd will switch to edit mode...
Sure, but there are other ways to instantiate an object, like when opening a patch or with dybanic patching, where PD won't switch to edit mode.
cheers