I don't know what any single incantation should look like. Do you mind sharing what you have tried so that I can fool around with it some myself. On Nov 5, 2011 5:24 PM, "Drew Adams" wrote: > > > I'm having a very hard time understanding the documentation > > for display-buffer-alist. > > You are not alone. > > > emacs24 behaves differently than emacs23. > > Not only differently by default, but perhaps even altogether differently (?). > I'm not even sure you _can_ (easily? at all?) obtain the Emacs 23 behavior using > Emacs 24. And I'm not sure users will be able to easily understand the > differences. > > Fortunately, Emacs 24 has not yet been released. > > > Could someone please post the setq command to get emacs 24 > > to behave the way I am used to. something along the lines of > > (setq display-buffer-alist '(??????)) > > I wish someone could - or rather, to be more optimistic, I hope someone will. > Unfortunately, I cannot. I'm in the same boat as you, I'm afraid. > > Believe it or not, one of the main motivations for the changes was supposedly to > make things simpler! It was thought that the interactions among the existing > separate user options affecting buffer display, such as > `special-display-regexps' and `pop-up-frames', could confuse users. (Dunno > whether there were really any user complaints about this - I'm not aware of > any.) > > Another motivation was, I believe, to give users (and code) more control over > display details (which window, when, where, etc.). Whether that mixes well with > the goal of making things simpler is uncertain. > > So instead of a few different user options, we now have the single usine-a-gaz > `display-buffer-alist'. There seem to be enough knobs and dials baked into > `display-buffer-alist' to make its mastery worthy of a doctoral dissertation. > > And it's only a start, AFAICT. There are also changes to various functions and > commands, which can affect existing code. You've read the doc - you have an > idea what you're up against. > > There is not only a documentation problem and perhaps a use complexity problem. > There are also outstanding bugs. And the behavior seems to be "evolving" (i.e. > volatile) as (some) bugs get fixed and new ones are introduced. There was a > second redesign (overhaul) a relatively short while back. > > How we can find ourselves in _pretest_ phase under these conditions I really > don't know. I'm just hoping that things will all be fixed and clearly > documented before they throw the release itself over the wall to us lusers. > > Maybe in the end we'll all be far happier for all these changes. For now, I > feel the same as you: Somebody please tell me what incantation to use to get > back the behavior I had in Emacs 23 (22, 21, 20...). > > On n'arrete pas le progres... >