Re: Terminology in multi-tty primitives

[Chong Yidong <cyd@stupidchicken.com>]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

> I think you are wrong about suspend making no sense on GUI terminals:
> we have (in Emacs 23) suspend-frame that does work on GUI.

Since GUI terminals are basically a connection to a graphical display,
it doesn't (IMHO) make sense to talk about "suspending" the terminal.
As long as the display connection is open, you can minimize/iconify
frames on a GUI terminal individually.  In contrast, suspending a text
terminal actually does cause Emacs to relinquish control of the tty, and
this operation acts on all frames on that terminal.

> Anyway, the examples I gave were just that: examples.  Here's another
> example: we have make-frame-on-display, make-frame-on-tty, and
> make-terminal-frame; and then we have make-frame that can do all of
> the above.  IMO, it's terribly confusing.

make-terminal-frame should probably be renamed.  This is an internal
function that is not useful except when called from faces.el anyway.
Maybe we should call it internal-make-tty-frame.

> But again, maybe I'm the only one who is confused.  My confusion is
> exasperated by the fact that I cannot find any useful methodical way
> to describe all these functions with partially overlapping
> functionality in the ELisp manual.  Suggestions welcome...

As far as frame creation goes, there is just one primary Elisp interface
for making frames: the function `make-frame'.  The frame parameters
passed to `make-frame' determine where the frame appears.  The commands
`make-frame-on-display' and `make-frame-on-tty' exist just for
convenience: their purpose is to allow the user to interactively specify
a display or tty name to `make-frame', using the minibuffer.  Internal
functions, such as x-create-frame-with-faces and
tty-create-frame-with-faces, should not be documented in the Elisp
manual.