Re: Emacs mode for GDB - 2 questions

[Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org>]

    Such modeline-less windows may be useful for other purposes, so
    we should try adding them to see what use people can find for them.

I believe we already support windows without mode-lines.

    > We would need to decide on the UI for selection of these special
    > windows.

    For the UI, just set mode-line-format to nil to remove the modeline.

That is already the way to remove the modeline.
I'm talking about a different issue: how to handle these windows
for window selection, change of window size, etc.
If we don't get that right, the feature will be inconvenient for users.

    A related issue:  I've always thought it would be nice if emacs had some
    way of `binding' windows together, so that, they could be treated as a
    unit in some respects (i.e., other windows couldn't pop up between them,
    and perhaps switching buffers using C-x C-b would switch the _whole_
    group of bound windows instead of just the current leaf window).

This is another thing we need to work out in order for this
mode-line-less-window approach to work well.

    My vague thought was that since windows area already arranged in a tree,
    that somehow non-leaf windows could be marked as the `root' of a set of
    bound windows, and certain operations (switch-to-buffer?) would walk up
    the tree and use such `bound roots' instead of the leaf window if it
    found one.

Would you like to try to flesh out this design?  Rather than jumping
straight to the writing of code, try to write pseudo-code to make the
meaning of these intermediate roots more clear.  That way we can see
if it really is a usable solution.