Re: Use of dedicated windows in gdb-mi.el

[Oleh Krehel]

Drew Adams <address@hidden> writes:

>> >> I dislike non-soft dedicated windows because they're bad design.
>> >
>> > What's the bad design about having such a possibility?
>> 
>> You have a window. You switched to it explicitly. You want to change the
>> buffer that's in it, but you can't.
>
> If you want to change the buffer that's in the window, then you don't
> want a (normally) dedicated window.
>
> That doesn't imply bad design.  It just says that you did something
> (made the window dedicated) that you didn't want to do.  You shot
> yourself in the foot.  That's just bad aim on the part of the pilot.

I just issued "r" in `gdb', nothing else. Zero customizations and a
dedicated *output* popped up.

>
>> To top it off, it looks exactly the same all the other windows, 99.5% of
>> which that don't behave this way.
>
> Not for me, it doesn't.  I use options `special-display-frame-alist',
> `special-display-buffer-names', and `special-display-regexps'.
>
> *Messages* corresponds to my value of `special-display-regexps', which
> is ("[ ]?[*][^*]+[*]").  As such, it gets a different background color
> from my non-special frames.
>
>> Add even on top that it wasn't you who explicitly specified this
>> behavior for your window. This behavior was simply loaded from a
>> package.
>
> Blame that one on the package.  If that's true, and it that behavior
> is hard-coded and not user-configurable, then THAT is bad design.

The patch earlier in the thread attempts to make it user-configurable
instead of hard-coded.