Re: moving window handling into lisp

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@xemacs.org>]

martin rudalics writes:

 > Suppose the Emacs frame is a window in a tiling WM that just asked
 > Emacs to shrink that frame because the user needs it for another
 > application.

[...]
 > Believe me.  Deleting windows in some way is the one bullet we do have
 > to bite here.

But you're wrong!  A (radical) alternative is to shrink the Emacs
windows as much as possible, then ignore further shrinkage.[1]
The WM will shrink the shell widget's window, and the GUI server will
then clip the Emacs frame to fit.

The rationale is that the WM has shrunk Emacs past the size where the
user can get any work done anyway, and in that case the user will have
to tell the WM to resize Emacs to a usable size to get work done.  Why
not just leave Emacs's internal configuration as it is?

That should work nicely on X11.  Whether this works on Windows or Aqua
I dunno.

Another possibility would be to withdraw (iconify) the Emacs frame if
it's ask to shrink to the point where its windows' minimum size
constraints are violated.  The bug reports will be great: "I was
shrinking Emacs and suddenly it collapsed into a nano-black hole,
started spraying X-rays, and cured my cancer!"

Footnotes: 
[1]  It might be a good idea to keep Emacs's "viewport" centered on
point in the selected Emacs window.  Then again, it might not.