Re: Infrastructural complexity.

[joakim]

Thomas Lord <address@hidden> writes:

> On Thu, 2009-07-23 at 11:24 +0200, martin rudalics wrote:
>
>>  > Did I misunderstand something?
>> 
>> Not at all.  Only window groups are guaranteed to form rectangles.  I
>> never claimed that the remaining windows would add up to a rectangle.
>> And obviously you can't retrieve the remaining windows by calling
>> `window-list'.  You can subtract the windows in a window group from the
>> windows returned by `window-list' to get the "remaining" windows.
>
> That's a fine example of how window-groups
> are not quite the right concept here.
>
> I understand you to say that `window-list'
> should (by default) return all of the windows,
> grouped or not.   That won't DTRT in the use
> cases of greatest interest - where "groups"
> are supposed to be control panels around an
> edit area.   Just the windows in the edit area
> should be returned by default.
>
> That is, it seems to me - and yes this is 
> necessarily just an opinion about user 
> interfaces - that the edit area windows 
> should behave exactly like a traditional
> Emacs frame.  For example, C-x o navigates
> (normally) just among the edit area windows.
> Normal splitting or deleting of a window changes
> only edit area windows.  Programs that look for,
> say, a largest window to use to pop up some
> buffer should look only to the edit area (unless
> explicitly written to do otherwise).  It should
> take a special gesture (keystroke or mouse, different
> from C-x o) to select a window in a control panel
> and, once its selected the set of windows in that
> control panel are then the focus (the C-x o ring,
> etc.).

The way I see window groups, they behave like you describe.

I have, however, lost track of this thread, so I might probably miss
something.

>
> Emacs already has a way to segregate groups of
> windows in that way: frames.   That's what
> gives rise to the idea that control panels are
> mostly just a new way to render certain frames.
>
>
>
>
> -t
>
-- 
Joakim Verona