Re: What are invisible frames for?

[martin rudalics <rudalics@gmx.at>]

 > So, to determine how these MBs should be handled, it would be very
 > useful to understand what invisible frames are used for.

I'm using a minibuffer child frame which is invisible most of the time.
It becomes visible and reparented to the selected frame whenever I want
to talk to it.  Also, I have `tooltip-reuse-hidden-frame' non-nil which
means that my tooltip frame is invisible whenever it's not used.

In general, creating a new frame is expensive when you have many faces
defined (it takes up to two GC cycles here) so temporarily hiding and
reusing an existing frame is very useful for people on slower systems
like mine.

Finally note that during frame creation a frame is invisible until most
of its parameters have been processed to avoid that users have to watch
the various resizing steps and other visible changes participating in
that process.

martin