Re: Emacs mode for GDB - 2 questions

[Miles Bader <miles@gnu.org>]

Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:
> Suppose that every mode line (and every header line) were actually a
> separate window, and formatting of mode line elements was done by
> converting them into text in a buffer.  That would be elegant in some
> ways.  The usage of memory for this would be acceptable nowadays.
...
> What do people think?

I think it would be very cool, although the mode-line/header-line are
special cased to such an extent in the display engine that it makes me
wonder how many unseen gotchas there are.  Another cool think is that
this might make it easier to have multiple header-lines (or
mode-lines!), which I've sometimes wanted.

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).  I
would like it if the Gnus summary/article buffers were bound in this
way, for instance.  Promoting mode-lines and header-lines to real
windows might fit well with this sort of mechanism.

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.

Anyway, just a thought.

-Miles
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