Re: Question about üarent-frame changes

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> Date: Wed, 18 Sep 2024 20:52:00 +0200
> Cc: gerd.moellmann@gmail.com, emacs-devel@gnu.org
> From: martin rudalics <rudalics@gmx.at>
> 
>  > What you describe makes sens for GUI frames, but seems to make little
>  > sense for TTY frames, because frame visibility situation there is much
>  > simpler.
> 
> You mean because only one normal frame can be visible at any time.
> However, child frames complicate the situation considerably because
> Emacs itself has to take care of their visibility instead of the WM.
> 
> For example, I can type into a GUI window text beneath a (small) child
> frame as long as that child frame doesn't have focus.  Emulating such
> behavior with text emanating at the right of the child frame on a TTY
> seems tricky at least.

I'm saying that this scenario which you described:

> Reparenting is useful because you can set up one child frame for some
> special purpose, make it invisible when you don't need it, and move it
> to another frame and make it visible there whenever you want to.  On
> GUIs, this approach has the advantage that you can avoid the (at least
> here) costly process of setting up frame faces every time anew.  Emacs
> tooltips do that by default and I recall that showing a tooltip every
> time incurred two entire GC cycles here.

sounds not very useful to me on a TTY, because switching frames on a
TTY will make the child frame invisible anyway.  And why would I want
to see a child of frame F1 when I display only frame F2?

So reparenting seems almost pointless on a TTY.

Of course, I'm not objected to allowing such reparenting on TTY
displays, but given that Gerd says it's not trivial, I think we will
be fine without that feature on TTY displays.