RE: [Fwd: Frame Height Different for Default Frame and Additional Frames]

[Drew Adams]

> > Did we already settle on a "right" way to do this?  Robert expressed the
> > desire to keep the number of text lines invariant.  ISTR others wanted
> > the size of the frame on the screen stay invariant.  At least a similar
> > issue was recently brought up for menubars.  Finally, I'm interested how
> > changes of menu-bar-lines/tool-bar-lines are supposed to be applied and
> > handled - I'm quite lost in this context.
>
> I don't think we did.  But frame size can't in general stay constant as
> we have wm hints.  For example, I have 13 pixels of text height.
> That gives min resize 13.  The tool bar is 36 pixels.  So when the
> tool bar goes, either we increase text size by 3 (== 39, 3
> additional pixels) or by 2 (26, decrease by 10 pixels).
>
> I'll implement whatever seems easiest, and then people can suggest
> alternatives after that.

The fact that it is not always possible to maintain exactly the same overall
frame size because that size is not always an integral number of characters
is not a reason to not try to maintain the size as closely as possible.
Please don't simply "implement whatever seems easiest".

It is likely that there are different preferences for this based on
different uses of frames.

Someone who typically uses frames (e.g. non-nil pop-up-frames) might want
the frame size to remain the same (or as close to that as possible). Such a
user will want to fit frames, tile them, and perform other operations for
which the overall (outside) frame dimensions are significant. I and some
others are in this group.

Someone else might want the text content within the frame to remain
constant. Such a user might not care so much about the outside frame
dimensions.

The right approach to this is to provide a user option for it. There is no
sense arguing over which frame-size treatment is best in this regard, and it
does not make sense to simply code "whatever seems easiest" and then
entertain suggestions for changes after that.

Let's try to get it right now, and provide an option to let users choose the
behavior they want - different users use frames differently. We know that
character size does not always map exactly to pixel size, but that's not a
reason to not try to DTRT.