RE: should frame names be unique?

[Drew Adams]

> Your case didn't sound hypothetical indeed.  Drew's does, tho.

Uh, I was reporting Damon's case, AFAIK.

The original context for this was Damon's use of `icicle-select-frame', which
used `select-frame-by-name' at that time. (In Icicles, `C-0 C-x o' lets you
select frames by name, with completion. It now uses unique frame names.) 

Damon's original context was not the Frames menu. The general problem of
non-unique frame names exists for the Frames menu also, so I replied "both" to
your question. 

The point is the general limitation wrt frame names, not the particular by-name
access method. Frame names should be unique for the same reason that buffer
names should be unique.

> Basically, frame names in GUIs are currently assumed to be pretty much
> "display only", so they don't matter and having them unique 
> or not is of fairly low importance.

That's again just describing the status quo. It's not a justification: your "so"
doesn't follow. It's not _because_ the Emacs GUI or some other GUI currently
doesn't uniquify frame names that they should not be unique. The Emacs GUI
evolves, and it already has features that other GUIs do not have.

> This said, I wouldn't reject a patch that makes them unique,

I hope someone provides such a patch. If it were Lisp, not C, then I might.

> although I'd rather such a patch to only make them unique on a particular
> terminal, since I often access a single Emacs process from different
> terminals and would rather have most of my frames suddenly 
> get all named "foo<2>" just because there's already a "foo" on some
> other terminal.

I can't speak to the case for terminals. Everything I've said about this is for
the GUI case. If non-unique frames are inappropriate in some terminal contexts,
then exclude those contexts.

And if there is a good reason that some user might not want unique names in a
GUI context, then we could add an option for it. I can't imagine that, any more
than I can imagine a user wanting non-unique buffer names, but perhaps there is
such a reason.