Re: `auto-dim-other-windows` -- scrutiny invited

[Steven Degutis <sbdegutis@gmail.com>]

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Thanks.

The goal was to make it more obvious at a really quick glance where the
cursor is.

Thumbifying and iconifying won't suffice because generally I need all my
windows open at once. Maybe I'm abnormal.

For now I just made my hl-line face have a blue background. It's working
well enough for now.

-Steven


On Thu, Apr 4, 2013 at 4:55 PM, Drew Adams <drew.adams@oracle.com> wrote:

> FWIW, and ignore this if it doesn't help -
>
> 1. I suggest you start by asking yourself *why* you want to distinguish the
> selected window (or all the non-selected windows, which amounts to the same
> thing).
>
> If the answer it just to *make clear which* window is selected, then
> dimming any
> of them is not a great approach, IMHO.  If that's the only reason then
> presumably you would want all of the windows to remain easy to read etc.
>
> If the answer is just to more or less remove the non-selected windows from
> your
> attention, then I'd suggest that there are better approaches, including
> perhaps
> scaling their text smaller.
>
> IOW, if you do not really care whether the non-selected windows are as
> readable
> as the selected window, and you do not want to be distracted by them but
> would
> prefer to more or less ignore them temporarily, then why bother wasting so
> much
> screen real estate on them?  Taking up screen space with intentionally
> dimmed
> windows makes little sense to me.
>
>
> 2. Out of the box, text scaling does not free up any screen real estate:
> when
> you shrink text its window does not also shrink.  But if you use library
> `face-remap+.el' then non-nil option `text-scale-resize-window' shrinks the
> window along with the text.
>
> However, just resizing a window in conjunction with text scaling affects
> only
> the vertical space, not the horizontal space.  And shrinking one window
> grows
> the adjacent windows, so in itself it is not a solution to try shrinking
> all the
> non-selected windows.  The heights and widths of their frames would not
> change.
>
>
> 3. But you can also thumbify a frame, which is similar but it does shrink
> the
> frame.  It shrinks the text of each of its windows (so you would not want
> to
> thumbify the frame that has the selected window).
>
> You can set the thumbifying shrink factor so that thumbified frames are
> anything
> from tiny (active desktop icons, in essence) to only slightly smaller than
> normal.
>
> When you thumbify a frame, it puts its windows and text in the background
> in
> terms of your attention - and it frees up screen space.
>
> But the windows and text are still there and still usable.  Depending on
> the
> shrink factor you choose, this effect is more or less pronounced.
>
> Even very tiny frames whose text is unreadable can be effective in terms of
> searching text or monitoring process output.  IOW, for some Emacs
> operations you
> do not actually need to be able to read the text clearly.
>
> (Ordinary frame iconifying is of course another solution to the attention
> focus/distraction problem, albeit a somewhat coarse one.  It too gets less
> interesting frames out of the way.  But you cannot see their content or
> interact
> with it.)
>
> http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs-en/download/face-remap%2b.el
> http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs-en/download/thumb-frm.el
>
> Doc/screenshot of thumbified frames:
> http://www.emacswiki.org/FisheyeWithThumbs
>
>

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