Re: Window configuration UI (was: Neat features in Eclipse editor)

[Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org>]

    > When you switch from workspace A to workspace B, does your current
    > window configuration get recorded as workspace A?
    > That is an important aspect of Eclipse perspectives.

    Indeed.  Try out my naive attempt at it (see attached) immediately bumps
    into a significant problem: window-configurations are frame-specific, so
    I can't create a winconf "test1" in a frame and then use it in
    another frame.

Moving window configurations from frame to frame is not necessary
for the perspectives feature.  Perspectives in Eclipse seem to be
part of one frame, although I am not sure of that.

    > needs to be possible to get all the right behavior.  For instance, we
    > want GUD to be able to take advantage of this, with a predefined "gud"
    > perspective.  This predefined "gud" perspective should have a window

    This is another problem: window-configurations can't be saved&loaded.

That's a real issue, directly related to implementing perspectives.
To make perspectives persistent we need a way for Lisp code to get
access to the data in them.

In 1984 it was crucial for a window configuration to include window
objects to make it fast to switch to one.  But that may not be
necessary now.  So we could reimplement window configurations
using Lisp objects that hold the data in a transparent way.

Would someone like to try this?