bug#3366: 23.0.94; doc of split-window-preferred-function, display-buffer, etc.
"Drew Adams" <[email protected]>
| Newsgroups | gmane.emacs.bugs,gmane.emacs.pretest.bugs |
|---|---|
| Message-ID | <[email protected]> |
We should document more explicitly how to obtain the window-splitting behavior for buffer display that existed prior to Emacs 23. The NEWS says only this: "*** display-buffer tries to be smarter when splitting windows. The new option split-window-preferred-function lets you specify your own function to pop up new windows. Its default value split-window-sensibly can split a window either vertically or horizontally, whichever seems more suitable in the current configuration. You can tune the behavior of split-window-sensibly by customizing split-height-threshold and the new option split-width-threshold. Both options now take the value nil to inhibit splitting in one direction. Setting split-width-threshold to nil inhibits horizontal splitting and gets you the behavior of Emacs 22 in this respect. In any case, display-buffer may now split the largest window vertically even when it is not as wide as the containing frame." Most of that just describes the new behavior, repeating what is in the manual. That's OK, but insufficient for NEWS. The last two sentences are all that is said about how to get the pre-Emacs 23 behavior, and they speak only about horizontal splitting. Nothing is said about how to get the pre-Emacs 23 behavior for _choosing which window is split_, and that change is a radical departure from previous behavior - a change just as important as the change regarding horizontal splitting. It seems (but I'm not sure this works for all cases) that what is needed, to ensure that the same window as before is split, is to bind `split-window-preferred-function' to something like this around calls to `display-buffer': (lambda (w) (eq w (get-lru-window))) Even if this function is not an exact recipe for all cases, something like it should be mentioned, to help users get back the behavior that existed before the new "smarter" behavior was introduced. Preferably, Emacs would itself provide a function that users could use here - a function that would give precisely the pre-23 behavior in all cases. We should also make it clear that if you want the pre-23 behavior then you will need to wrap not only explicit calls to `display-buffer' with a `let' binding this way, but also calls to things such as `with-output-to-temp-buffer'. In GNU Emacs 23.0.94.1 (i386-mingw-nt5.1.2600) of 2009-05-24 on SOFT-MJASON Windowing system distributor `Microsoft Corp.', version 5.1.2600 configured using `configure --with-gcc (3.4)'