RE: Making Emacs more newbie friendly

[Drew Adams]

    One big advantage for me of Emacs over IDE editors is
    the way it lays out its windows. It is very useful when programming to
    have two windows side by side, or above and below each other. The only
    way to do this in an IDE editor is to manually resize all your windows
    to fit (then you still have too much space wasted for extra title and
    status bars) or to set it to tiled (and have all windows that you have
    open tiled).

I don't want to get in the middle of this making-Emacs-friendly thread. This
is only to let you know that if you do prefer to use window-manager
windows - that is, what Emacs calls frames - for everything, then you can
still easily tile your buffers. You do not need to resize them manually.

See my library `frame-cmds.el'
(http://www.emacswiki.org/elisp/frame-cmds.el) for commands
`tile-frames-horizontally' and `tile-frames-vertically'. These commands have
an option (`C-u') for tiling only two frames that you designate; otherwise,
they tile only the visible (non-iconified) frames. So you do have control
over what gets tiled.

Another convenience is being able to resize a frame incrementally, using the
keyboard (`C-M-' arrow keys) instead of the mouse. The commands for these
key bindings are in my library `fit-frame.el':
http://www.emacswiki.org/elisp/fit-frame.el.

Personally, I use Emacs frames, not Emacs windows, for everything. I use
`ediff' to compare buffers in separate frames (that I have tiled
horizontally or vertically). I also have a separate standalone frame for the
minibuffer (the other frames have no minibuffer area) - this stretches along
the entire width of my display, at the bottom. I don't use the toolbar, so I
don't waste space with that (actually, I use my popup toolbar:
http://www.emacswiki.org/elisp/tool-bar-plus.el). Yes, I do lose the menu
space for each frame - you can of course get rid of that too, if you like.
For instance, you might decide to use a standalone "menu" frame.

 - Drew

P.S. There is a problem with the above frame-cmds.el link today. I've
reported the problem to the EmacsWiki maintainer, so I expect it will be
fixed soon. You can get to the same file today with this link instead:
http://www.emacswiki.org/elisp/frame-cmds.el.gz.