Re: Suggesting `frame-split-biggest-window' Re: customize location and shape of a new window in a frame

[Roland Winkler]

On Thu Sep 13 2018 martin rudalics wrote:
> One functionality Emacs is sadly lacking is that of orderly setting up
> and saving compositions of windows in form of a rectangle.  Eclipse
> calls these "perspectives", in Emacs the concept of "window state"
> comes most closely.  Currently, you have to set up such a state by
> using a sequence of 'split-window' calls which requires to know the
> intrinsics of window splitting, the relationship of parent and child
> windows, window combinations and the like.  Using 'display-buffer' for
> setting up states will hardly produce good results.

Much agreed!

How is it possible that (as confirmed on this list)
gnus-window-to-buffer and gnus-add-configuration can be used to make
BBDB interact with Gnus windows as expected, while BBDB's function
bbdb-pop-up-window for creating BBDB windows does not know anything
about Gnus' mechanism for managing window layouts?  When I first
heard of gnus-window-to-buffer and gnus-add-configuration I thought
this cannot work with BBDB because Gnus will bring its own
hand-crafted functions to create windows, functions that obey the
customizations using gnus-window-to-buffer and gnus-add-configuration.

> It would be nice to have some sort of basic, prefabricated layouts
> like the ones you sketched and choose from them.

Again: much agreed!

Can `display-buffer-alist' mentioned by Stefan do that (at least: in
principle)?  I looked at its documentation in the elisp manual (not
the Emacs manual!), and I could not figure out how to use this
variable to achieve the goals discussed here.  Does
`display-buffer-alist' provide the same functionality as the Gnus
code discussed in this thread?

Certainly, it would be nice if different packages like Gnus and
other MUAs could use the same code for the generic problem of
defining window layouts so that a package like BBDB can interact
with this, too.