Re: "Adobe Brackets like" editing in emacs

[phillip.lord@newcastle.ac.uk (Phillip Lord)]

Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:
> That implementation would be convenient if we want Emacs commands
> to treat the two as separate windows.  Is that what we want?
>
> Likewise with the proposal to use a tooltip-like frame for this.
>
> Likewise with the proposal to use display-strings for this.
>
> There are many ways to _show_ text from multiple files.  The crucial
> question is, how do we want editing commands to work in that mode?
> That will constrain the possible implementations much more.
>
> We might want to create a C-level construct for showing parts of
> various buffers as if they were a single buffer, and arrange for
> editing primitives such as insert and delete to operate on
> the underlying buffer for the part of the text where you do them.


I think it might be worth considering whether we want something a bit
more generic at a C-level.

At the current time, the feature cannot be mimiced in Emacs because of
the lack of an appropriate GUI feature (tooltips is the closest).

My thought, is what we need is a new GUI feature that I call
"mini-window". Essentially, this would be like a current window (with
all the features would expect -- point, buffer and so on). But it would
differ from a current window in that: a) it would have no or few
decorations -- no border, no scrollbars, no mode line and b) it's
positioning would be wrt another window -- it would either be positioned
at one of the cardinal positions of an existing window or it would be
positioned wrt a marker or an overlay in an existing buffer. The latter
would scroll with the main buffer, the former would be static.

With this GUI feature, we could implement quite a few other things. So,
the multi-file editing would be use miniwindows positioned on a marker.
Multi-mode editing could do the same (i.e a miniwindow with an indirect
buffer in a different mode). Enhanced drop-down, tooltips for
documentation could use the same feature (i.e. what would appear to be
an in-window replacement for `with-help-window').

Other features would include the open and close hide/show markers down
the left side of a buffer which Eli was talking about a few weeks ago --
I had a brief play with this and it *might* be possible with fringes but
it's clunky. And yet another would be one of those displays showing an
shrunken overview of the whole buffer, like sublime -- currently the
closest to this is fisheye-with-thumbs
http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/FisheyeWithThumbs. For that matter, this
could also be used to replace and reimplement the fringes.

Just a thought -- in the ideal world an update to the C layer should
give a generic toolkit that can then used in different ways.

Phil