Re: xref and displaying locations in appropriate window or frame

[Dmitry Gutov]

On 01/27/2016 12:10 PM, martin rudalics wrote:
> My suggestion was and is to display X at the bottom of the frame via
> ‘display-buffer-at-bottom’ like *Completions*.  So if there were, say,
> two side-by-side windows originally, this would put X in a "classical"
> area designated for "view" windows by IDEs.

I see. But that's an interesting comparison, because *completions* only 
seems to use display-buffer-at-bottom when you're typing in the 
minibuffer, but not when completion occurs in a file buffer. So It's 
only used when *completions* would appear above the place you're 
currently looking at.

> What makes you think that average IDEs don't have side-by-side splits
> for file windows?  ECB has them IIRC.

I've used the popular ones. ECB is just an Emacs extension, and a 
dormant one, at that.

IIRC, Intellij IDEA has added the capability to do side-by-side splits, 
but they're not used by most users, and you can't split the view window 
area anyway (and we can!).

>  > Thus, a file search output will be just as wide, and one can't really
>  > do better that display it in a full-width window as well at the
>  > bottom. I'd say that would show too few lines, when my font of choice
>  > is used, but the IDEs seem to handle it fine somehow with their
>  > defaults.
>
> Yes.  Do you see any problems with that?

IIUC, in Emacs it would require me to lower the font size to function 
adequately, and that would negatively impact readability.

>  > and xref output (though not
>  > Grep, because it includes a file name on each line) is about the same
>  > width, so by putting it at the bottom we'll waste the right half of
>  > the "view windows area".
>
> Yes.  We're back at my inital proposal to give *xref* buffers a
> multicolumn layout.

Indeed, it would be an improvement in that situation.