Re: Understanding atomic window groups

[martin rudalics <rudalics@gmx.at>]

 > Oh I see, thanks. I thought I had to check for the 'window-atom
 > parameter on the parent, if there was a parent.

Atomic windows can be arbitrarily nested so checking for atomicity of
the parent alone is in general not sufficient.

 >> 'quit-window' does not necessarily restore to a state that invalidates
 >> the atomicity of the containing group.  'delete-window' OTOH may do
 >> that, so if 'quit-window' deletes all windows of an atomic group but
 >> one, that atomic group is dissolved automatically.
 >
 > Hmm, maybe it was `delete-window' that raised the error:
 >
 > delete-window: Root of atomic window is root window of its frame
 >
 > Whereas `quit-window' behaves in a way I can't quite pin down -- it
 > killed the buffer in one case but not in another, didn't change the
 > actual window layout, and moved point to the "first" of the atomic
 > windows.

'quit-window' calls 'window-deletable-p' before it tries to delete a
window so it should never cause a "Root of atomic window is root
window of its frame" error.  If it does cause an error we have a bug
so maybe check again.

'delete-window' OTOH will raise an error when the root of the atomic
window is the root of the frame.  If you want to avoid that, typically
because most of your users who type C-x 0 expect the selected window
to disppear or those typing C-x 1 expect the selected window to become
the single window of its frame despite of atomicity, you will have to
adjust the behavior with the help of 'delete-window' and
'delete-other-windows' parameters for all involved windows.

martin