Re: Infrastructural complexity.

[Miles Bader]

martin rudalics <address@hidden> writes:
>> Once you start letting the WM have any control all bets are off --
>> remember, it's _not_ just initial placement, but movement, sizing
>> [think: tiling WM!], additional WM-added frames, dealing with the many,
>> many, differences between WMs on different platforms, etc.
>
> The user is supposed to control the WM

AFAIK, the problem people are trying to solve right now is a way of
increasing the power of emacs _automatic_ control over window layout --
burdening the user with the placement and moving of these sub-windows is
exactly what we _don't_ want to do.

> and tiling WMs should manage multiple Emacs frames better than Emacs
> itself is able to tile a frame into multiple windows.  After all
> that's what tiling WMs are supposed to do well.

They certainly don't do it well, not if you want application-specific
inter-relationships between a set of different windows (which is exactly
what we want).

[They do an OK job of laying out completely independent application
windows in some case, at least to a point.]

> So once we decided that the multi-frames approach is a non-starter we
> should decide that tear-off windows and windows with menu- or toolbars
> are non-starters too.  Can we agree on that?

I don't know if "tear off" windows are a goal or not, but tearing off a
emacs sub-window is an explicit user action saying "ok, I as user am now
assuming control over this sub-window."  So _moving_ a torn-off emacs
internal window into its own separate frame would actually be the most
natural thing to do.

-Miles

-- 
"Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that
 you do it."  Mahatma Gandhi