Re: patch for optional inhibit of delete-other-windows(IDE feature)

[martin rudalics <rudalics@gmx.at>]

 > To all questions: YES, except the recursively subdividing one: What do
 > you mean exactly?

My question was badly formulated.  I wanted to know whether the
edit-area could be always obtained by recursively splitting a window in
some arbitrary way such that the resulting tiling would encompass the
_entire_ edit-area.  That is, none of the windows produced by these
splittings would not be part of the edit-area.

A simple example not following this concept would be: Split a window
vertically, split the lower window vertically, the upper two windows
(and their sub-windows) would constitute the edit-area, the lowest
window would not be part of the edit-area.

I'm asking because currently reasoning about tiling Emacs windows is
purely operational.  A tiling is always the result of recursively
splitting an initial window into sub-windows.

 > Currently the concept of ECB is:
 > - Exactly one frame

Does that mean I can't run ECB in two frames simultaneously?

 > - The is *always* exact ONE edit-area, which is always a rectangle

I suppose this will be the basic invariant.

 > - The special windows are located either at the left, at the right or
 > on top of the edit area

Is the compile window you mention below not a special window?

 > - the edit-arey can be subdivided in as many windows as possible

OK.

 >>Can all operations you need be subdivided into whether they either
 >>apply to all windows in the edit-area or to all windows outside the
 >>edit-area?
 >
 > Almost: Currently ECB needs three canonical window-lists:
 > - full window list of the ECB-frame
 > - all windows in the edit-area
 > - all special ECB-windows
 > - the compile-window (always displayed at bottom) when displayed

How do you currently display the compile window, make it go away,
display it again, ... ?

 > canonical means: always the same sequence beginning from top/left-most,
 > ie. the same order an unadviced version of `next-window' would walk
 > through

I suppose you mention `next-window' here because you use it to modify
the standard commands - sometimes they should operate on the full
windows list, sometimes just on the edit-area list?

 >>What mechanism do you use to access a window outside the
 >>edit-area - do you suspend advices?
 >
 > What do you mean with "access"?

I meant "select", for example, using `other-window'.  How do you select
the compile-window or the other special ECB-windows when you're in the
edit-area?

 > Yes, currently the layout of the non-edit-area is immutable in this
 > sense that redrawing the whole layout of the ECB-frame resizes the
 > special windows back to their cusomized (via customize) sizes
 > (can be absolute or - prefered - relative) whereas the sizes
 > of the windows in the edit-area will be preserved by a layout-redraw,
 > means the sizes the user has choosen by dragging modeline or what else...

Does that mean special windows are not fixed-size, so the user can
freely resize them?

 >>Do you want the edit-area occasionally occupy the entire frame?
 >
 > Yes, there is a command which allows to hide or to toggle visibility
 > of the special windows - you can imagine that this needs complex and
 > smart code-stuff to preserve the window-layout of the edit-area during
 > that, but it works stable and error-less...

We should be able to do this using window-configurations.

 > IMHO temporarly hidding the special windows (ie. only the edit-area
 > and all its windows are visible in the ECB-frame) is a very important
 > feature of an IDE...

Sure.