Re: Neat features in Eclipse editor

[Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>]

> The Emacs ECB package is designed to do all of this in Emacs. It has been
> discussed for inclusion. It uses lots and lots of advice to achive the
> sub-frame feature. Recently I did a small review of the code to see if
> it would be possible for me to remove the advice, by providing suitable
> hooks in Emacs. It did not apear immediately obvious how to do this.

There are a few packages that like to take control of a frame and
display various windows inside.  Gnus and gdb-ui come to mind.

Similarly, users (and commands by default) often like to control the
frame as a whole, without much regard for the various windows already
present, assuming that minor changes aren't important as long as the
user can adjust them later.

ECB's effort in this is very valuable.  It would be good to provide some
kind of functionality to make ECB's task easier and to make it possible
for users to give a sub-part of a frame to Gnus.

I'm not sure if that should be provided via a new concept of "subframe",
or by making it possible to collocate several frames together (within
the same GUI window).

Maybe a lightweight approach would be to be able to tag each and every
window with a "subframe" property, such that a "subframe" is simply the
set of windows with the same "subframe" value.

The only problem with all of that, is the added complexity.  E.g. Are we
going to have a family of functions FOO-BAR-other-subframe?


        Stefan