Re: xref and displaying locations in appropriate window or frame

[martin rudalics <rudalics@gmx.at>]

 > First, I'd like to point out that your suggestion was to split the
 > current window and display X in the bottom part of the split. Which,
 > if there were, say, two side-by-side windows originally, wouldn't put
 > X in any of "classical" areas designated for "view" windows by IDEs.

My suggestion was and is to display X at the bottom of the frame via
‘display-buffer-at-bottom’ like *Completions*.  So if there were, say,
two side-by-side windows originally, this would put X in a "classical"
area designated for "view" windows by IDEs.

 > But suppose I misunderstood, and the end result would be putting X
 > into a lower part of the frame, below all file windows. Which fits an
 > average IDE fine, because they don't have side-by-side splits for file
 > windows (let's keep to Emacs terminology here),

What makes you think that average IDEs don't have side-by-side splits
for file windows?  ECB has them IIRC.

 > so one can at least
 > expect that a average line of code is more or less as long as the
 > frame width. Maybe less, but probably longer that width/2.
 >
 > Thus, a file search output will be just as wide, and one can't really
 > do better that display it in a full-width window as well at the
 > bottom. I'd say that would show too few lines, when my font of choice
 > is used, but the IDEs seem to handle it fine somehow with their
 > defaults.

Yes.  Do you see any problems with that?

 > That's not necessarily untrue in Emacs community, where we're often
 > more conservative, and hold to 80-100 chars per line. Then, we can
 > afford to put file windows side-by-side,

... assuming your 229 columns wide frame, I suppose ...

 > and xref output (though not
 > Grep, because it includes a file name on each line) is about the same
 > width, so by putting it at the bottom we'll waste the right half of
 > the "view windows area".

Yes.  We're back at my inital proposal to give *xref* buffers a
multicolumn layout.

 > But I don't really have a better layout in mind, and different
 > long-time users probably solve this question differently. So, really,
 > the best I can do is use as much from the default window allocation
 > strategy as I can, and hope that users with more exotic demands manage
 > to override the given behavior to their satisfaction.

Let's see.

martin