Re: Infrastructural complexity.

[Thomas Lord <lord@emf.net>]

On Tue, 2009-07-21 at 19:28 +0900, Miles Bader wrote:

> I have not thought deeply about how to implement tear-off windows.

I think there is confusion in this thread because
"tear of *windows*" aren't a feature that's commonly
used.   Tear-off menus and toolbar controllers are
commonly used (and are nice to use).

In other words, by "tear-off" we shouldn't mean that
you grab an arbitrary Emacs window from its frame,
tear it out, and then it has its own frame.  Rather,
it's more like you click on a toolbar item -- a new
(usually tiny) window system window "pops up" with a 
bunch of sub-options to choose from.  You can either 
pick an option - in which case the tiny pop-up 
disappears - or you can "tear it off" in which case
it is persistent and you can pick multiple options
from the choices.

For example, to draw a rectangle in the OO diagram
editor you click a "shape" icon on a toolbar and up
pops a tiny window of possible shapes you might
want to draw.  You can pick "rectangle" and the tiny
window goes away and you are in "rectangle drawing mode".
On the other hand, you can "tear off" the tiny window,
pick "rectangle", draw a rectangle, then pick "ellipse",
draw an ellipse, and so forth.

Those tiny windows could be modeled nicely, I
think, as framelets:  frames with a non-nil parent.

-t