RE: patch for optional inhibit of delete-other-windows(IDE feature)

[klaus.berndl]

martin rudalics wrote:
>  > Hmm, its a good starting point but not complete. Simply think of
>  ECB > as a tool which wants to display some special windows beside an
>  > "edit-area" whereas the former one are used to display
>  informational > context stuff as parsed tags of the current buffer
>  in the edit-area > or a file- and directory tree or a buffer-history
>  or or or... > The latter one (the edit-area) should give the user
>  the feeling as > if all windows of this edit-area would be the only
>  windows in the > frame so all standard operations would act as if
>  the edit-windows > would be the only windows in the frame...
> 
> Is the edit-area always a rectangle?  Can it be always created by
> recursively subdividing an initial window?  Is there always at most
> one edit-area?  Is there at most one edit-area in one and the same
> frame? 

To all questions: YES, except the recursively subdividing one: What do
you mean exactly?

Currently the concept of ECB is:
- Exactly one frame
- The is *always* exact ONE edit-area, which is always a rectangle
- The special windows are located either at the left, at the right or
on top of the edit area
- the edit-arey can be subdivided in as many windows as possible

> 
>  > Well, a window property for preventing other windows outside the
>  > edit-area from being deleted or for a navigation only in the edit-
>  > area by other-window would be a good starting point but its not the
>  > end of the story:
> 
> Can all operations you need be subdivided into whether they either
> apply to all windows in the edit-area or to all windows outside the
> edit-area?

Almost: Currently ECB needs three canonical window-lists:
- full window list of the ECB-frame
- all windows in the edit-area
- all special ECB-windows
- the compile-window (always displayed at bottom) when displayed
canonical means: always the same sequence beginning from top/left-most,
ie. the same order an unadviced version of `next-window' would walk
through

>What mechanism do you use to access a window outside the
> edit-area - do you suspend advices?

What do you mean with "access"?

> 
>  > What about saving and later restoring the current window layout of
>  the > edit-area (means only these windows inside the edit-area)
>  without > affecting the layout of the special windows?
> 
> Do you also need to save and restore the layout of the non-edit-area?
> Earlier I got the impression that the non-edit-area would be
> immutable, so you could easily include it in the saved configuration.

Yes, currently the layout of the non-edit-area is immutable in this
sense that redrawing the whole layout of the ECB-frame resizes the
special windows back to their cusomized (via customize) sizes
(can be absolute or - prefered - relative) whereas the sizes 
of the windows in the edit-area will be preserved by a layout-redraw,
means the sizes the user has choosen by dragging modeline or what else...

> Do you want the edit-area occasionally occupy the entire frame?

Yes, there is a command which allows to hide or to toggle visibility
of the special windows - you can imagine that this needs complex and
smart code-stuff to preserve the window-layout of the edit-area during
that, but it works stable and error-less...
IMHO temporarly hidding the special windows (ie. only the edit-area
and all its windows are visible in the ECB-frame) is a very important
feature of an IDE... 

> 
>  > And how to implement an option like
>  > `ecb-layout-always-operate-in-edit-window'
>  > (see docstring) without adviceing e.g. switch-to-buffer?
>  >
>  > Just take a look at the docstring of the adviced
>  `switch-to-buffer': > IMHO even with the new pins advices are needed
>  to offer a smart and > convenient usage of an IDE like ECB...
> 
> Couldn't this be done with the help of a `switch-buffer-function'?

Yes, probably this would be possible!

> 
>  > maybe i will find next weekend the needed time to write down a
>  small > "functional reqirement specification" which core
>  functionality would > be required by Emacs to rewrite ECB without a
>  lot of its advices or > at least with much simpler advices...
> 
> If possible, please list also invariants which can be used to cut down
> the overhead for providing these requirements.  Like "for any frame
> the number of edit-areas it displays is zero or one".

yes, this was my intention - see above...

Klaus