Re: Infrastructural complexity.

[Thomas Lord]

On Wed, 2009-07-22 at 12:12 +0200, martin rudalics wrote:

>  > Tear-off menus and toolbar controllers are
>  > commonly used (and are nice to use).
> 
> And these can be implemented independently from window groups.
> 
>  > Those tiny windows could be modeled nicely, I
>  > think, as framelets:  frames with a non-nil parent.
> 
> What is the parent of a frame?  Not an Emacs concept, I presume.

It is a concept I'm trying to persuade people
to use *instead of* window groups.  I think
that window groups are too complicated and that
they add generality of dubious, perhaps negative
utility.

With the change I'm proposing, frames gain
a new slot - a parent slot - whose value is
either nil or another frame.   Elisp programs
can *not* modify this slot arbitrarily.

No frame with a non-nil parent slot can itself
be parent to another frame (at least not initially)
thus nesting is limited to one level.

Frames with non-nil parent slots can be created as
pop-ups that can be torn off.   Additionally, each
frame with a nil parent slot has four children that
share its same window system window.  (See my earlier
message with the Subject line "16 (Re: ...)".)

When a parent frame is minimized or deleted, it's
child frames are also minimized or deleted.

This is a cleaner way, imo, to accomplish what
window groups are trying to accomplish.

-t