Re: "Adobe Brackets like" editing in emacs

[Richard Stallman]

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    You could emulate something similar with windows. If this view is only
    temporary while the editing is progress then the code could split the
    current window below the relevant line, hide the mode line temporarily,
    so there is no distracting ui element between the referring code and
    the referred code and put the definition in the bottom window.

That implementation would be convenient if we want Emacs commands
to treat the two as separate windows.  Is that what we want?

Likewise with the proposal to use a tooltip-like frame for this.

Likewise with the proposal to use display-strings for this.

There are many ways to _show_ text from multiple files.  The crucial
question is, how do we want editing commands to work in that mode?
That will constrain the possible implementations much more.

We might want to create a C-level construct for showing parts of
various buffers as if they were a single buffer, and arrange for
editing primitives such as insert and delete to operate on
the underlying buffer for the part of the text where you do them.

Should they give errors if applied to regions that
stretch from one file to another?  That would be easy to do
and would sidestep hard problems that perhaps don't need
to be solved.

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation
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