Re: How to restore the layout?

[Juanma Barranquero]

On Mon, Jul 1, 2013 at 4:11 PM, Drew Adams <address@hidden> wrote:

> Another possibility/suggestion, from little-to-no knowledge of this
> stuff: Simply do not record or restore a minibuffer-only frame.

Yes, that's one posibility, but then, if the user moved or resized it,
these changes won't be restored. Not a deal breaker, but something to
take into account. OTOH, restoring a minibuffer-only frame does not
really make much sense unless you do it first of all and set
default-minibuffer-frame to it...  Time to go doing some
experimenting.

> Otherwise, record the `minibuffer' property of a frame, including the
> case where it is nil (no minibuffer).

The `minibuffer' property can contain non-readable things, like a
window reference.

> (But
> from your message I now have a doubt: is it necessary to associate the
> ordinary restored frames with the existing standalone minibuffer?)

minibuffer can be t/n/only, but also a reference to a minibuffer
window in another frame.
- t : nothing to do, it works out of the box
- nil: emacs will try to associate the frame with
default-minibuffer-frame or create one minibuffer frame for it
- only: as discussed above
- a window: we currently can do nothing about this, because we do not
have a way to name windows and restore references to them.

> Keep in mind that to use a standalone minibuffer you really need to
> set it up at startup time, e.g., from the command line or from your
> init file.  You cannot add a (useful) standalone minibuffer after Emacs
> has already created its first frame, which has its own minibuffer.

Yes. minibuffer-only frames and their brethren are strange beasts.

   J