Frame visibility

Frame visibility

[Joost Kremers]

Hi,

The Elisp manual says that a frame can be visible, invisible or 
iconified. Visible and iconified (a.k.a. minimized) are clear, but 
when exactly is a frame invisible? And what happens if I use 
`select-window' on a window that is displayed in an invisible 
window?

TIA

Joost



-- 
Joost Kremers
Life has its moments

Re: Frame visibility

[Michael Heerdegen]

Joost Kremers <joostkremers@fastmail.fm> writes:

> The Elisp manual says that a frame can be visible, invisible or
> iconified. Visible and iconified (a.k.a. minimized) are clear, but
> when exactly is a frame invisible?

AFAIU the manual, an invisible frame is just not displayed (...visible),
so it's like "iconified" but without an icon, I guess.  With other
words: something like minimizing implemented in Emacs.

> And what happens if I use `select-window' on a window that is
> displayed in an invisible window?

Why don't you just try it out (without any guarantee from my side, if
your whole computer gets invisible, I won't pay for it).


Michael.

Re: Frame visibility

[Stefan Monnier]

>> And what happens if I use `select-window' on a window that is
>> displayed in an invisible window?

Nothing unusual: it makes the window "selected", unsurprisingly, so
after that `selected-window` will return that (invisible) window.

If redisplay happens when an invisible window is selected, then none of
the visible windows will use the mode-line face that corresponds to the
selected window.  And depending on various other thing, it may also be
that none of the Emacs windows will have focus.


        Stefan

Re: Frame visibility

[tomas]

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On Mon, Dec 05, 2016 at 03:35:55PM +0100, Michael Heerdegen wrote:
> Joost Kremers <joostkremers@fastmail.fm> writes:
> 
> > The Elisp manual says that a frame can be visible, invisible or
> > iconified. Visible and iconified (a.k.a. minimized) are clear, but
> > when exactly is a frame invisible?
> 
> AFAIU the manual, an invisible frame is just not displayed (...visible),
> so it's like "iconified" but without an icon, I guess.  With other
> words: something like minimizing implemented in Emacs.

Exactly. This is window manager parlance. Those things correspond to
the ICCCM values "Normal", "Iconic" and "Withdrawn" values of the
(X) window's (which is an Emacs frame) WM_STATE property[1].

However the window manager decides to represent those things, they
are sometimes creative :-)

All Emacs does (all Emacs *can* do) is to request the style from
the WM, by setting some X properties on its windows (frames). The
window manager, as configured by the user then maps those abstract
requests to a concrete appearance.

I do like it that way. Imagine my browser could start deciding on
how its decoration looks, controlled by some random shi^H^H^H
obscure javascript off some obscure rag-du-jour page. No, thanks.

As Michael says... perhaps they hide your computer.

Regards

[1] https://tronche.com/gui/x/icccm/sec-4.html
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