Window resizing

[Keith M. Knowles]

Greetings,

I will start by saying that Emacs is clearly one of the Seven Great
Programs of the world.  My screen is Emacs maximized with a shell
window etc inside.  I've been using it since 1985...

You know how when something is _nearly_ but not quite perfect that
one little imperfection seems to be magnified, like a nit under a huge
magnifying glass...?

The thing is that Emacs used to be completely perfect!  Then about
5..10 years ago someone changed something.  (It's so long ago, I
could be wrong: I could be comparing GNU with Gosling-on-VMS, but
I reckon you folks don't want to hear about that.  Like I say, I've been
using Emacs for a long time.)

It used to be that you could carefully size all your windows to optimize
use of the screen real estate.  You could use switch-to-buffer-other-window
and it would bring the buffer up in (predictably) another window but leave
the geometry of that window as-is.

Then the change got made: the buffer comes up in a default sized window.
I.e. the current size of the window got changed (and therefore other windows,
too).

I betcha it's too late to change this behavior now because generations of
new users have gotten used to (and depend) on this behavior, but I still
don't see why that change was made and it's the one and only thing about
Emacs that annoys me.

Now that I've expressed this, I reckon I'll feel better.

Best regards,
Keith

P.S.    If I'm right that this change did occur during the history of GNU Emacs,
        and that it's a misguided change, and you can track down who did it:
        please tell him or her that he owes me a beer!  Thanks a lot.