RE: `auto-dim-other-windows` -- scrutiny invited

["Drew Adams" <drew.adams@oracle.com>]

FWIW, and ignore this if it doesn't help -

1. I suggest you start by asking yourself *why* you want to distinguish the
selected window (or all the non-selected windows, which amounts to the same
thing).

If the answer it just to *make clear which* window is selected, then dimming any
of them is not a great approach, IMHO.  If that's the only reason then
presumably you would want all of the windows to remain easy to read etc.

If the answer is just to more or less remove the non-selected windows from your
attention, then I'd suggest that there are better approaches, including perhaps
scaling their text smaller.

IOW, if you do not really care whether the non-selected windows are as readable
as the selected window, and you do not want to be distracted by them but would
prefer to more or less ignore them temporarily, then why bother wasting so much
screen real estate on them?  Taking up screen space with intentionally dimmed
windows makes little sense to me.


2. Out of the box, text scaling does not free up any screen real estate: when
you shrink text its window does not also shrink.  But if you use library
`face-remap+.el' then non-nil option `text-scale-resize-window' shrinks the
window along with the text.

However, just resizing a window in conjunction with text scaling affects only
the vertical space, not the horizontal space.  And shrinking one window grows
the adjacent windows, so in itself it is not a solution to try shrinking all the
non-selected windows.  The heights and widths of their frames would not change.


3. But you can also thumbify a frame, which is similar but it does shrink the
frame.  It shrinks the text of each of its windows (so you would not want to
thumbify the frame that has the selected window).

You can set the thumbifying shrink factor so that thumbified frames are anything
from tiny (active desktop icons, in essence) to only slightly smaller than
normal.

When you thumbify a frame, it puts its windows and text in the background in
terms of your attention - and it frees up screen space.

But the windows and text are still there and still usable.  Depending on the
shrink factor you choose, this effect is more or less pronounced.

Even very tiny frames whose text is unreadable can be effective in terms of
searching text or monitoring process output.  IOW, for some Emacs operations you
do not actually need to be able to read the text clearly.

(Ordinary frame iconifying is of course another solution to the attention
focus/distraction problem, albeit a somewhat coarse one.  It too gets less
interesting frames out of the way.  But you cannot see their content or interact
with it.)

http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs-en/download/face-remap%2b.el
http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs-en/download/thumb-frm.el

Doc/screenshot of thumbified frames:
http://www.emacswiki.org/FisheyeWithThumbs