eichin@ATHENA.MIT.EDU ("Mark W. Eichin") (05/06/91)
There's a feature I've seen a few places (most recently on my Cambridge Systems Z88 laptop, in the PipeDream editor) that might be interesting to have in emacs. I can't think of anyway to do it in elisp, though I'd welcome ideas (and code :-) that proves me wrong... Specifically, I'd like to be able to say that the top N lines of this buffer are always the top N lines of the window they're in (it could be buffer local, or even window local, that's not the issue.) Then if the "window" was scrolled down, those lines would hang in there. This would be useful in a number of applications, particularly in things like newsreaders or other "tools" that are wrapped in emacs that have more of a "mode" than would fit in the mode line... I could do something with two windows on the same buffer, but emacs just doesn't have any useful abstractions for managing screen configuration, and the user could easily accidentally jump into the other buffer, or hit C-x 1 and obliterate the whole thing. Something with selective-display would almost work, though it would require replacing all scrolling commands in that buffer with things that changed the number of lines with ^m's... possible, but it would not work with things like isearch that do most of their motion in C code. Any suggestions? I could just implement this, if there is interest. _Mark_ <eichin@athena.mit.edu> MIT Student Information Processing Board Watchmaker Computing <eichin@watch.com> ps. Don't tell me "wait for Emacs 19". It doesn't sound like it's going to have most of the redesign that I'd expect in something that's taken this long to complete...