Re: I wish list-buffers used my current window when it listed my buffers

[Jay Cotton]

On Aug 16, 2013, at 9:33 AM, Michael Heerdegen <michael_heerdegen@web.de> wrote:

> Jay Cotton <jay.cotton@gmail.com> writes:
> 
>> Is it just you and me, or do lots of others also think this behavior
>> makes better sense? (From a windowing perspective, that is. I can't
>> speak to the technical pros and cons of electric-buffer-list vs. the
>> traditional list-buffers, I just like that the former opens in the
>> same window.)
>> 
>> I list buffers *constantly* when I'm working in emacs. I've always got
>> 3 or 4 windows open, and I'm somewhat OCD about keeping things where I
>> want them, and the problem is that with such an arrangement, I can't
>> always predict where list-buffers is going to pop up the buffer
>> list. I haven't studied the problem carefully, and I assume it has
>> something to do with the order in which I created the windows. But I
>> don't always create the windows in the same order. Usually my
>> arrangement just sort of evolves as I'm working, and in any event I
>> can't always predict which window will be used to pop up the buffer.
>> 
>> This difficult-to-predict window behavior has always seemed un-emacs-y
>> to me. And I've always wondered if I'm somehow "doing it wrong" since
>> it causes me such grief when my .emacs file isn't available.
> 
> Configuring `display-buffer-alist is a good solution in the most cases.
> For the other cases, you at least have winner.el to undo buffer popping
> you didn't want (`winner-undo').
> 
> BTW, AFAIK Stefan plans to implement prefix keys that control the buffer
> displaying behavior of the following command.  There would be a default
> behavior, and you can use those prefixes to deviate from the default.
> 
> Michael.

I didn't know about winner.el. Thanks, that sounds very useful.

Also, the window behavior prefix command sounds like a neat idea. It seems like 
it would have to be either:

a) different for different commands, in order to maintain existing differences 
in prefix args (ie., C-u C-x 'some-command might already mean something)

or 

b) obscure enough that it would risk being tedious to use

right? A difficult task indeed, I hope I can help somehow.

Thanks again,
Jay