Re: switch-to-buffer: for interactive use only

[Chong Yidong <cyd@stupidchicken.com>]

Juanma Barranquero <lekktu@gmail.com> writes:

> That would resurrect the bug recently fixed in bs-cycle-next where it
> opened another window when the selected one was strongly dedicated. It
> is called "cycle", not "bring-me": either it can cycle a new buffer
> into the window, or it should say that it cannot. That's what it does
> now, and that's the right thing to do.
>
> For some operations on a buffer with a strongly dedicated window, it
> makes sense to pop up another window; for some others, it does not.
> Conflating both is never going to be a good answer. Well, strictly
> speaking, we can do that and use `display-buffer-alist' to allow the
> user to override it; but bs-cycle-next, and operations of that kind,
> should do the right thing out of the box.

It seems to me that such cases are very much in the minority---AFAICT,
the vast majority of uses of switch-to-buffer in the Emacs sources
simply have the intention "show BUFFER, but try not to make a new window
to do it".

So, if creating a new window is the wrong thing for bs-cycle-next, it
should be bs-cycle-next that changes---e.g. by changing from
switch-to-buffer to set-window-buffer---not everything else in Emacs.