Re: should frame names be unique?

[Stefan Monnier]

>>>> What is the difference between those frames showing the same buffer
>>>> (is it just to display two different parts of a buffer, if so do the
>>>> various frames play different roles?  Are they on different screens?
>>>> Can you see their names in the title bar? ...)
>> 
>>> I can't answer any of those questions.
>> 
>> So you're not faced with this problem in practice.  It's just
>> a hypothetical issue?

> Here is an example I tend to run into.  I have a large frame where I am
> doing most of my work.  I have popped up two smaller frames to  provide
> reference to different parts of the same file.  I wish to use  the
> buffers>frames> menu to select one of the three frames displaying portions
> of the file.  One, I am editing in, the other two, I have for reference.

So you want to change frame-title-format so that the "same-name-frames"
don't have the same name.  A simple way to do that is the setting
I suggested (which adds "F<nn>" to every frame name).

> Not at all hypothetical,

Your case didn't sound hypothetical indeed.  Drew's does, tho.

> although I am more inclined to use a keyboard
> command, rather than the mouse, so somewhat contrived.

What keyboard command would you use?  One thing you may want to use
is a variant of windmove.el that allows the same kind of movement but
between frames.  But that's typically better provided by the
window-manager than by Emacs.

Basically, frame names in GUIs are currently assumed to be pretty much
"display only", so they don't matter and having them unique or not is of
fairly low importance.

This said, I wouldn't reject a patch that makes them unique, although
I'd rather such a patch to only make them unique on a particular
terminal, since I often access a single Emacs process from different
terminals and would rather have most of my frames suddenly get all named
"foo<2>" just because there's already a "foo" on some other terminal.


        Stefan