Re: man.el

[Juri Linkov <juri@jurta.org>]

"Eli Zaretskii" <eliz@elta.co.il> writes:
> I don't think it's quite that simple.  The correct choice depends on
> where will Emacs pop the window in which it displays the formatted man
> page.  Since window popping follows some quite comlpex logic, it could
> be wrong to use window-width in the case you cite.
>
> I think we need some machinery to allow us to know in advance where
> the window will pop.  Perhaps we should create the window before
> running the `man' command, or maybe decide in advance where to pop the
> window and force Emacs to pop it exactly where we tell it.

This looks like a new notification method.  While it might be good
enough to make it sometime the default method, it will not solve
the problems of existing notification methods, which should retain
their current unpredictable (wrt window configuration) behavior
for backwards compatibility.  So I don't see a solution better than
adding a new user option to define the number of columns, because it
mostly depends on user's actions between invoking the man page
formatting and displaying the man buffer.  And one useful property of
this option also is that the user unsatisfied with guesses made by
frame-width or window-width can set a fixed integer value.

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