Re: tags-loop-continue

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org
> From: Dmitry Gutov <dgutov@yandex.ru>
> Date: Thu, 21 Jan 2016 07:59:11 +0300
> 
> On 01/20/2016 02:19 PM, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> 
> > My other problem is with the "disappearing *xref* buffer" phenomenon:
> > it is too easy to lose it, and not so easy to get it back.  With 'A'
> > (dired-do-find-regexp) it's enough to type RET on a line in the *xref*
> > buffer in order to have its window deleted; the only way to get it
> > back AFAICT is to manually switch to that buffer, which means the user
> > must remember its name.
> 
> Or repeat the search. After the repeating it enough times, the user 
> might start to remember the name of the buffer.

Repeating the search was precisely what I did.  But that's not exactly
user-friendly, I think.

> > You cannot continue the search without
> > switching back to *xref* first.
> 
> You mean with `next-error'? When so, it's simply a bug in next-error.

Using next-error never occurred to me (there's nothing about that in
NEWS or in the manual).  Yes, that works.  But it has the problem you
mentioned in a past discussion: if you have (say) a Grep buffer from a
recent search, it's not easy to tell next-error which of them to use.
I guess the feature you suggested back then for making this easier
never materialized?  Maybe we should introduce it now.

> > So I think RET should not delete the
> > window in this case.  Maybe it should never delete the window, in
> > other users of xref, I'm not sure.  At least in this case, unlike with
> > xref-find-definition, it is much more probable that the user _will_
> > want to go to the next match, so it makes less sense IMO to delete the
> > window.
> 
> Let's say I agree. What shall we do with xref-find-definitions? Should 
> the user understand somehow that in this case RET won't bury the buffer, 
> and in xref-find-definitions' case, it wont?
> 
> I suppose we could provide a separate key (`a'?) that would do what RET 
> does now.

Maybe we should make RET do the same as '.' in all cases, and provide
a separate key to delete the window showing *xref*.

WDYT?