Re: Should killing a help or compile buffer also delete the window?

[Kevin Rodgers]

Daniel Brockman wrote:
> I've always found it annoying that Emacs seems to have a habit of
> leaving junk windows around whenever you invoke something that needs
> to display information in a temporary buffer.  I think it just gives a
> really sloppy impression, especially when you aren't used to it.
> Two of the most common examples might be `M-x compile' and `C-h f'.
> It also happens with things like `M-x grep' and `M-x locate'.
>
> I realize that you can't expect Emacs to know when you are done with a
> window unless you actually tell when.  The obvious way to tell when is
> to type `C-x 1' or `C-x 0', but this leaves the temporary buffer
> lingering, which makes me nervous.
>
> When I was new to Emacs, I would always kill a garbage buffer before
> deleting its temporary window.  Eventually, I discovered `C-x 4 0' and
> started using that.  As time went by (and I got lazier), I gradually
> began to accept the fact that you really can't avoid having a bunch of
> old garbage buffers unless you spend a lot of time chasing them down,
> so I started just doing `C-x 1', though it always made me feel dirty.
>
> Now to the point of this message.  Some time ago I started using
> Dictionary Mode[1], which has caused me to once again pick up the
> habit of killing temporary buffers.  As you might know, killing a
> dictionary buffer automatically kills the window as well, unless the
> window was already there when the dictionary buffer was created.
> This makes a lot of sense to me --- so much sense that the normal
> Emacs behavior has once again started to annoy me.
>
> I believe the Right Thing to do when the user kills a temporary buffer
> whose window was created as a side-effect of displaying the buffer in
> question is to restore the old window configuration.  At least when
> the automatically created window hasn't been used for anything else,
> Emacs should take the hint and get the window out of the user's face.

Have you tried displaying those temporary buffers each in its own frame,
via special-display-buffer-names (or special-display-regexps)?  That
frame's sole window is dedicated to the buffer, and so killing the
buffer deletes the frame.

--
Kevin Rodgers