Re: quit-window

[Richard Stallman]

    > As far as buffers are concerned, it is no different from any other
    > change in selection.  That's not supposed to change anything about
    > any buffer.

    Except for the buffer associated with the temporary window, right? If the
    content of the window is of temprary nature (in most cases) I would want
    to kill the associated buffer when the window is quit.

Yes, it sometimes does kill the buffer.  But that should work like
killing the same buffer through any other command.

    > Thus, if a mode tries to do something nontrivial to the buffer on the
    > occasion of quitting, that makes me worry.  Should that be done at
    > all?

    That would have to be decided on a case by case basis, I think. 

We need to start by deciding them case by case.  But if we see enough
cases, we might be able to adduce some general rules about how to
handle them.

    > I looked at Info-exit and it seems ok, because it is only doing
    > something special in the case of stand-alone Info.

    It wraps `quit-window' in a way that I cannot use `C-u q' to quit the
    window and *kill* the buffer, though. 

You're right that it has a bug.  My point is that the basic idea of
using a special `Info-exit' command is reasonable.  There is no reason
why `quit-window' should try to handle any special needs of
stand-alone Info in Emacs.

However, if stand-alone Info in Emacs is obsolete, we can just delete
`Info-exit' and use `quit-window' directly.

    but did not bind it to quit-window, but some other function,
    e.g. ibuffer-quit.

    Here I am wondering if the same couldn't be achieved by a call to
    (the new and improved) `quit-window'.

It could be so.  Anyway, what we see here is special manipulation of
the window configuration.  That's the sort of thing that makes sense
for `quit-window' to do.  So if it doesn't already do everything
that's most useful for ibuffer, maybe we should extend `quit-window'
to do whatever it is.

    I will create a list of the occurrences I found and look at if (and what)
    functionality would get lost if the function used `quit-window'. This is
    obviously only for cases where the additional functionality deals with
    window management.

That seems like a very useful thing to do.



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Dr Richard Stallman
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