Re: Infrastructural complexity.

[Thomas Lord]

On Fri, 2009-07-17 at 19:49 -0400, Chong Yidong wrote:
> > To me, Emacs frames are an existing abstraction that is already very
> > close to how each individual panel, tearoff, and pop-up works...  One
> > example is if you look at Eclipse screen shots and the panel down the
> > left side - sometimes it is split vertically; sometimes the user gets
> > to add additional vertical splits.  That panel is, to my mind, a frame
> > -- just with this slight "subordination" addition and perhaps a
> > restriction about which buffers can be displayed there.
> 
> The proofs of concept written by Joakim and Martin already handle this
> behavior.  They don't require much of a change to the usual window
> semantics, either; the only new rule is that window operations only
> effect the windows within the current window group (e.g., C-x 1 would
> not delete the windows in other groups).


To my old, stubborn, set-in-my-ways mind yes, window
groups "handle that" but in a needless way.  No "new rule"
is needed for the concept of a set of windows that are the
scope of window operations - we've already got one: a frame.




> The only thing new that the "framelets" idea brings to the table is the
> possibility of a separate set of tool-bars. 


I don't think that that's a fair characterization.
Framelets accomplish the use-case goals but without
complicating the window abstraction and with only a very
minor complication added to frames.



>  But I don't think it's a
> big advantage considering (i) the extra engineering that would be
> required to get these extra toolbars to work, and (ii) the fact that
> Emacs is mostly keyboard-driven anyway.

There is no reason that toolbars can't be "keyboard-driven"
so I'm not sure what you are saying.

Toolbars are nice because they are a form of "passive recollection"
interface.   You have to actively remember that C-f means forward-char,
passive recollection is being able to search through a menu of 
commands.   For very large command sets, such as found in 
word processors or IDEs, support for passive recollection
command access is a good thing.

-t