preece@ccvaxa.UUCP (10/17/86)
I haven't really used Unipress emacs enough to have a strong feeling about transient windows, but they SEEm like a good idea to me, as I'm sure they do to Unipress. I HATE having the help system scrozzle the windows I have on screen. I often expend silly amounts of effort on having the windows int the relationship to each other than I want them to have (size and position both count). Most emacses seem rather cavalier about this -- anything that emacs wants to get your attention about causes it to use one of your windows, generally with no thought to getting back to exactly the screen layout you had. Unipress's transient windows are at least trying to go that way -- they only appear temporarily and don't screw up what's underneath. I consider that thoughtful. [I make no representations about whether they work or not...] I have always been of the "messy-desk" persuasion -- my desk has many piles, but I know where most everything in them is. If the janitors re-arranged my piles every night I would be mightily displeased. My video desktop is just as important to me; I don't like emacs screwing with my windows. -- scott preece gould/csd - urbana uucp: ihnp4!uiucdcs!ccvaxa!preece arpa: preece@gswd-vms
jpayne@rochester.ARPA (Jonathan Payne) (10/22/86)
Why isn't there a variable called "send-typeout-to-buffer". When it's on it creates a window and sends the output to a buffer (and it can still do the stuff about remembering the previous context, and all), and when the variable is off it just sends output to the screen the way the original EMACS did. Seems to me that most of the time THAT is the desired behavior (sending just to the screen, until the user hits Space or something). Nobody really ever wants a list of the buffers to take up a window. If you want a dump of the keybindings so that you can print them out, you turn the variable on and presto, you have a buffer full of keybindings. And the other 99% of the time you leave the variable off, thus increasing the life expectancy of your keyboard as you no longer feel the need to break something when your carefully laid out windows are no longer what they were spozed to be. That's my opinion, anyway ...