Re: ECB

[Jason Rumney]

Richard Stallman <address@hidden> writes:

> Does speedbar have any advantages over ECB?  In other words, if
> we replaced Speedbar with ECB, would we lose anything?
> If so, could those features be added to ECB?

It is a different interface which many longtime Emacs users may be
used to. I don't think ECB can display in a seperate frame, though it
might be easy to change it so. There may also be modes that speedbar
supports that ECB does not. Speedbar seems to have special support for
info for instance, which I don't think is present in ECB.

> Having both ECB and Speedbar would be duplication, and in general
> it is better to avoid duplication when there's no good reason for it.

We already have duplication between etags and imenu. And semantic
(part of CEDET, along with speedbar) offers more features over both.
ECB and speedbar are just different ways of presenting the
information etags, imenu and semantic can produce. Speedbar uses one
buffer in a seperate frame containing a single tree heirachy. ECB
uses several buffers for different types of information.