Re: Windows' "split status"

[Chong Yidong <cyd@gnu.org>]

martin rudalics <rudalics@gmx.at> writes:

> But I wonder where and how people would want to use such a variable.

For the same reason they'd use `window-nest'.

My problem with `window-nest' is that the term is misleading: windows
can still be "nested" even when `window-nest' is nil, in the sense that
groups of live windows are nested within internal parent windows.  A
non-nil `window-nest' only means that a parent window can have only two
children.

That's why I think it's better to replace the "window nest status"
concept with something like "the number of allowed children", which is
more direct.  Then there's no reason to limit to a binary choice between
having two children and having unlimited children; we might as well
specify the number of children as an arbitrary integer > 1.

An alternative term might be window-combination-max-size.

I don't care so much about the issue of whether to implement this with a
window parameter rather than a special slot.  The former seems
conceptually cleaner, but the latter is fine if you think it's
technically simpler.

> For me it's neither trivial to understand nor trivial to implement.
> So I'd be very glad if you gave it a stab.  You can't break much -
> earlier Emacsen always failed to recombine the windows from my
> example.

I'll take a look, though there are other a couple of other tasks I have
to handle before getting to it.