Re: Modernize frame-title-format: "%b - GNU Emacs"

[Yuri Khan]

On Sat, 29 Aug 2020 at 02:03, Drew Adams <drew.adams@oracle.com> wrote:

> > The name of the application in the title is useful. It helps you pick
> > the Emacs window out of multiple applications operating on the same
> > file. For example, a Dired buffer showing a directory and Thunar
> > showing the same directory.
> >
> > This is important in contexts where the window contents are not
> > visible, e.g. a taskbar showing minimized windows, or a
> > tiling/tabbing/stacking window manager such as i3 showing a single
> > window in the stack and the titles of all other windows in the same
> > stack.
>
> The discussion is about the _default_ frame title.
> Users can define their own title formatting.

Users should not have to customize the title for the common case.
Which I believe to be multiple applications on the desktop.

> How common is the use of multiple applications
> (in separate window-mgr windows) for the same
> file or directory (or other argument)?
>
> (Not a rhetorical question - that's never been my
> experience.)
>
> Wrt your examples of a file or dir, showing the
> buffer name should be even more specific, and
> even better distinguish from some other app
> window for the same file or dir, no?  Especially
> if the other app puts its app name first in the
> title.

All well-behaved applications in many desktops (Windows, XFCE, GNOME,
KDE) show the document name and their own application name in the
title bar. It’s a convention, and it’s useful because this way
application authors do not have to consider whether a document name
alone is enough for the user to distinguish the window. Somebody has
already thought this through and decided that both components are
useful.