Re: xref window switching problems

[Dmitry Gutov]

On 08/04/2015 10:42 PM, Ingo Lohmar wrote:

> - the point of the *current* window is moved to the target location
>    (just what the user wanted to avoid, I suppose)

That's clearly a bug. Should be fixed now, thanks.

> - when the current window is the only one showing the buffer in
>    question, then the same buffer is newly displayed in another window we
>    pop to (hence at the same position)

Aside from the bug above, this seems to be the intended behavior.

> - when another window already shows the same buffer, we pop to this
>    buffer --- less annoying, but still unexpected and not helpful

I'm not sure if it's a problem, actually. That's how pop-to-buffer 
works. In general, it would even use the current window if it already 
displays the buffer in question, but for 
xref-find-definitions-other-window, we explicitly ask it to use another 
window. So it uses the other window displaying the same buffer.

> The old pre-xref elisp implementations and the tags functions got the
> "...-other-window" behavior right IMO: Leave my current window's buffer
> and point alone in any case, and pop to the target shown in another
> window.

Are you sure it doesn't reuse the second window that displays the same 
buffer?

> The change would be easy (see xref--pop-to-location), first get the
> buffer, then do the window business, and only then xref--goto-location.

The choice of how to implement it was not so easy. Pretty much because

(with-current-buffer (current-buffer) (goto-char (point-min)))

moves point in the current window.

> Maybe xref-pop-marker-stack could benefit from a discussion as well.

Maybe it could benefit from a patch proposal.