Re: annoyances [Was: shrink-window-if-larger-than-buffer in VC-diff]

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Uday S Reddy writes:

 > But the more general point is about Emacs taking liberties with
 > switching windows.  I suppose you understand that.

I understand, but don't necessarily sympathize.  For example, with
find-file, it's pretty clear that automatically switching windows is a
good thing.  Maybe in the case of C-x ` (is that `next-error' in your
context, as it is for me?) it should be optional.  I admit I'm an
infrequent user of next-error, but I think it's quite natural to
switch windows since it's documented as visiting the error buffer and
the corresponding source file.  This is almost always what I want.  If
you don't like that behavior, you need to write your own function that
implements the workflow you want.  As usual.[1]

It's true that many third-party modes do things like switching windows
that I find really annoying.  However, most of that has long since
been beaten out of modes and functions that are part of core Emacs.

Footnotes: 
[1]  If the basic functionally you need is all hard-coded into
next-error, making this an annoying process of copying many large
sections of code, I would consider that a design bug.  But if
next-error is well-factored into an error parser, a source finder, and
a window popper-upper, it should be easy to write your alternative
workflow, perhaps with some minor refactoring.