RE: Request for pointers and advice: displaying several buffers inside a single window

[Drew Adams <drew.adams@oracle.com>]

> I tried zones once, but abandoned exactly
> because I was looking for showing all zones at once (not cycling
> through them).

To be clear, there's no need to cycle among zones.
No need to see only one at a time. You can see all
of them all of the time, as well as see the other,
non-zone text, of any and all buffers.

What zones.el does not offer is showing the text
of more than one buffer in the same Emacs window.

> > But if your question/request is about displaying text from different
> buffers in the same Emacs window then zones.el won't help you.
> 
> Yep. Displaying and editing (with synchronised changes in those
> buffers).

See above.  You can display and edit all zones at
the same time.  And there's no synchronization
needed.  What you can't do with zones is show and
edit the text of more than one buffer in the same
Emacs window.

I say all of this only in case it helps somehow.
My intention is not to have you use zones.el.

Maybe consider this feedback as just letting you
know that I, at least, don't quite understand
what you're trying to do (or why).

Emacs doesn't let you use the same window for
multiple buffers, as far as I know.

You can finagle ways to show text from multiple
buffers in the same window, e.g. by copying it.
And if you do that, and you then want to edit
the copies, then, yes, you'll need to then sync
up the original buffers with your edits.

Maybe there's a library that does that for you.

There are libraries that let you put different
parts of the same buffer in different major
modes (in effect).  But that too is different
from having multiple buffers in the same window.

I wonder what your reason is for wanting that?
That "why" might help explain your request.