bug#53745: [DOC] About invisible frames

bug#53745: [DOC] About invisible frames

[Kevin Vigouroux via Bug reports for GNU Emacs, the Swiss army knife of text editors]

Could you provide some use cases for invisible frames?

⏵ Emacs Lisp Ref. Manual — section “29.11 Visibility of Frames”
• https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Visibility-of-Frames.html
-- 
Kevin Vigouroux
Best regards

bug#53745: [External] : bug#53745: [DOC] About invisible frames

[Drew Adams]

> Could you provide some use cases for invisible frames?

Whatever you can imagine for why you might want
to hide a frame ;-) - there's no limit.

To start with, invisibility gives frames a state
with two possible values, distinguishing them -
for whatever purpose.

And one of those hides the frame.  You can easily
and quickly split the set of frames into two sets,
any time, any way you like, for any purpose.

Most Emacs frame functions let you optionally act
only on the visible frames.  Making some invisible
temporarily means you can exclude them from such
actions - only the visible frames are affected;
the invisible ones are not.

This lets you act in ways similar to what Dired's
`t' (`dired-toggle-marks') does - 2 sets of frames
to work with: in front of, and behind, the looking
glass.  You can omit (hide, make invisible) the
marked or the unmarked files.  (Similarly, with
Bookmark+ you can show just the marked or just
the unmarked bookmarks.)

You can quickly flip visibility for any or all
frames.  You can, for example, hide all but one,
to unclutter - and later restore all.

Invisible, as opposed to iconified, frames don't
show up as icons (e.g. in the MS Windows Task Bar,
or on a desktop).  You see as icons only what you
want to see as icons, even though the invisible
frames are still present etc.

bug#53745: Toggle the visibility state of frames

[Kevin Vigouroux via Bug reports for GNU Emacs, the Swiss army knife of text editors]

One could say that it’s not that obvious! At first sight, I don’t see
much point in making a frame invisible.

`make-frame-invisible' is a special command only mentionned in the Emacs
Lisp Ref. manual. The user must be able to select the frame again to
make it reappear using `make-frame-visible'. It is not clear if it is
possible to run `make-frame-visible' interactively (as a command).

So far, the only reference I have found about this topic is
`minibuffer-exit'.

#+begin_quote
`minibuffer-exit'

When this parameter is non-‘nil’, Emacs will by default make this frame
invisible whenever the minibuffer (see Minibuffers) is exited.
Alternatively, it can specify the functions ‘iconify-frame’ and
‘delete-frame’. This parameter is useful to make a child frame disappear
automatically (similar to how Emacs deals with a window) when exiting
the minibuffer.
#+end_quote
-- 
Kevin Vigouroux
Best regards

bug#53745: Toggle the visibility state of frames

[Michael Heerdegen]

Kevin Vigouroux via "Bug reports for GNU Emacs, the Swiss army knife of
text editors" <bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org> writes:

> One could say that it’s not that obvious! At first sight, I don’t see
> much point in making a frame invisible.

I think it's just something like "minimize", but only from Emacs (no
window manager involved), and you get no icon or whatever to restore the
frame.  Maybe "hide" would be a better name: you can't click on a
invisible frame, it is not on the screen at all until you restore it.

I think for most today users invisible frames are something low-level,
something more or less internal.

Michael.