Re: Windows splitting: prefer only 2 windows horizontal spliting.

[martin rudalics <rudalics@gmx.at>]

 > You can enforce this function to not split WINDOW horizontally,
 > by setting (or binding) the variable `split-width-threshold' to
 > nil.  If, in addition, you set `split-height-threshold' to zero,
 > chances increase that this function does split WINDOW vertically.
 >
 > The last sentence prompted me to set split-height-threshold to 0
 > and that is probably why I constantly got smaller and smaller windows
 > instead of reusing a previous window.

Replacing "zero" by "a smaller value" might cause less confusion here.

 >> Actually it means "don't split windows horizontally" ;-)
 >
 > Yea.  I totally don't understand the language here.  A vertically line
 > creating two windows is splitting it vertically in my pee sized brain.
 > Sorry about that.

I'm afraid every second user interprets this as you did.  Unfortunately,
it's not easy to find a less confusing term here.  We could replace
"horizontally" by "side-by-side" but I have no idea which term to use
instead of "vertically".

 >> What effect were you looking for?
 >
 > What emacs use to do before split-window-sensibly.

Do you use wide frames so Emacs tries to split them into side-by-side
windows?  What are your frame sizes?

 > At the time, I concluded that it wasn't a bug in the code but just
 > that I misread / misunderstood the documentation.  I believe I tried
 > setting split-width-threshold to nil and split-height-threshold (after
 > trying 0), I tried leaving it alone and it still didn't go back to the
 > old method.  Setting split-width-threshold to some giant number
 > seems to take a different path through the code and gives me
 > the old behavior.

If you never want more than two windows per frame the following should
be sufficient:

(setq split-height-threshold nil)
(setq split-width-threshold nil)

martin