Re: customizing emacs windows

["Lennart Borgman (gmail)" <lennart.borgman@gmail.com>]

Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>> Date: Thu, 24 May 2007 15:55:24 +0200
>> From: "Lennart Borgman (gmail)" <lennart.borgman@gmail.com>
>> CC:  help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org
>>
>> However I do not know if there is a way to save it. It contains the 
>> information needed in something that looks like #<window-configuration> 
>> when trying to print it. Is there a way to print this so that it can be 
>> saved?
> 
> winner.el uses functions from ring.el to maintain its info.  The
> various print functions are your friends.  Reading those hashed
> objects might be a little tricky, but you could perhaps use the
> technique similar to desktop.el to output, instead of the objects,
> function calls that create the objects.


I think it is only you get back from (current-window-configuration) that 
holds the information that winner.el uses to restore the windows. 
Everything is there so winner.el does not have to do very much.

Unfortunately you can not investigate the value of this and it prints 
just as #<window-configuration>. I think I remember now that we (I do 
not know if you were involved) discussed this on the devel list.

Because of this I use (window-tree) instead which gives the necessary 
window structure information.

For now I can not see any other way to save the window configuration 
than something similar to what I have done in winsav.el.

It is however complicated to do this on the lisp level (as in 
winsav.el), the window layout is probably more easier handled on the C 
level, like in set-window-configuration. So for a long term solution I 
would think it is much better to enhance the printed representation of 
the value of (current-window-configuration) so that it could be used 
together with (set-window-configuration) for save/restore from file. A 
bit more than the printed representation must be added of course, but I 
guess that is clear.

Eli, I would be glad if you put this in etc/TODO. I think that at the 
splitting of the top level in window tree is also a matter to consider 
there. (That this can not be done was the main reason for writing 
winsav.el.)